


that may be found, if sought

by byzantienne, coldhope



Series: all that you love will be carried away [4]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Emperor Hux, Evil Space Boyfriends, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-31 01:24:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 47,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6449899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne/pseuds/byzantienne, https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The final story in the <i>all that you love will be carried away</i> trilogy. </p>
<p>Insurrection requires manpower, money, and most of all, <i>secrecy</i>. After the events of <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/5876530/chapters/13542787"><i>for there is nothing lost</i></a>, General Hux and Kylo Ren must suffer exile, separation, and the banality of punitive administrative assignments in order to protect their growing conspiracy against Supreme Leader Snoke and his infelicitous management of the First Order.</p>
<p>But exile, while expedient, can be unspeakable; and in the vast reaches of the galaxy there are so many variables they cannot control.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> illustrated by [givenclarity](http://givenclarity.tumblr.com/)!

> _Ren:_
> 
> _I don’t know how to begin, so I’ll just start by complaining._
> 
> _Two weeks into this assignment and I'm playing myself music in my head so as not to snap at people in an unprofessional sort of way, and it's not working because I've played you so much of this stuff that every piece makes me think of you all over again, and that's what I am trying not to do in the first place. I need to find some other way of distracting myself. The work is tiring and requires effort and concentration, but not enough concentration to keep my mind from wandering._
> 
> _I've drawn your starfields from memory and that makes it worse, because I'm not entirely clear on a couple of the constellations down your left side and of course not being sure makes me need to see them at once so I can refresh my memory. Not having you in my mind hurts. It’s as if something has been cut away. I feel -- blind and deaf, on a peculiar level, being alone in my head._
> 
> _I'm not good at putting any of this into words. If you were here I could tell you all these things properly, but then again if you were here I wouldn't have to. Mostly I'm just a little infuriated at myself for dealing with it all so badly. I ought to be able to bear this for a finite stretch of months, and I'm not bearing it with any grace at all._
> 
> _Tell me what you're doing. Tell me how stupid and boring and wearisome it is and how annoying you find every aspect of it. Tell me about the weather, and how many things you have destroyed with your lightsaber, and who has to pay for them, and how many people you have frightened into incoherence with a glare from the mask. Tell me all about it._
> 
> _I've put a slipdrive in this capsule with a particular Umir sonata I haven’t played for you yet. Something about the richness of the strings makes me think about your hair, and the light caught in it, and -- I want you to hear it, too, Umir is better than I am at saying things._
> 
> _I -- want you. To a truly alarming extent. I had not realized that missing someone could actually cause physical pain. Talking of which, if Phasma's been in touch with you, please disregard her complaints. I get precisely as much sleep as is required. I have said as much to her._
> 
> _Write to me. Please._
> 
> _H_

#

 

Officially speaking, it was a Sienar-Jaemus Fleet Systems Illyrium ComStar V Hyperwave Repeater Station, one of hundreds of identical installations entrusted with carrying the First Order’s communications network traffic. To most of the people who were tasked with building and staffing it and running its eventual day-to-day operations it was just _the station_ , or sometimes _the bounce rig_ , or _the rig_.

Sienar-Jaemus provided these things under contract to the First Order with some assembly required: large sections of the structure were prefabricated and separately shipped to the construction site to be put together. It saved some time, and cut down on the complexity of the build task, but there was something about having to direct the assembly of an oversized child’s building-block kit that nagged at Hux. He _couldn’t_ sleep, despite what he’d said in the letter he'd sent Ren, and so over the past few weeks he had spent rather a lot of time rereading the construction plans into the small hours of the night; it felt as if his head was _stuffed_ with information, heavy with it, as if data had physical weight. That wasn’t new: Starkiller had done that to him, too, and he was partly glad of the reminder of better times and partly miserable at the reminder that they were over.

On the way here he and Phasma had gone over a list of Phasma's troopers and what they knew of the assigned communications and engineering staff, and decided which ones were trustworthy right now, which ones might be so in the future, and which ones they needed to discreetly get transferred away as fast as might be feasible; then they had conducted an extremely intense series of personnel interviews. The troopers they had deemed ready to hear it were read in to what Hux was abruptly obliged to think of as _their conspiracy_ ; security clearance nineteen. He and Phasma had kept the whole group waiting in a hangar together, before bringing them in _one by one_ for interview and then reassignment or clearance, and then released them into a different hangar. The technique added a certain element of terror to the proceedings, but it also ensured that the subjects discussed during the interview remained unknown to the people still waiting their turn. It had been an exhausting experience, but Hux had been pleasantly surprised at the number of people they had been able to place in the _trustworthy_ category. The work they had to do required the presence of reliable staff members in key positions throughout the organization, and he was satisfied, now, that this would be _possible_. 

A few weeks into construction, and the basic infrastructure of the station was taking shape: a toroidal section through the center of which a long tapering cylindrical module extended to either side. On the plans it looked a lot like a cigar with a fat ring around the middle. The toroidal section would house the habitation and operations facilities: the rest of it would support the many, many antennas the station would require to do its job. It was essentially a combined repeater for a trunked system, but the sheer number of channels involved was a little staggering; part of the control staff’s duty was simply to monitor the signal strength of each channel and make the antenna adjustments necessary. 

And _listening in_ to the signals themselves, while engaged in this monitoring activity, was almost unavoidable. Which was why everyone involved in running operations had a security clearance -- both from Snoke and now, from him and Phasma. It really was remarkably convenient.

Hux watched from the command bridge of the freighter he was using as his temporary headquarters. Beyond the viewports the scene was inevitably untidy, like all construction sites: three other freighters waited to disgorge their cargo, and over the skeleton of the station itself troopers in vac-suits and construction tugs swarmed like insects. Starlight glinted off metal and plascrete as they moved: a kind of slow twinkling that reminded Hux a little of firefights in space, seen at a distance. 

As soon as the central core structural elements were in place, they could install the reactor. It would be delivered probably sometime tomorrow or the next day: a smaller relative of the SJFS III a-1-a hypermatter-annihilation reactor he had studied so carefully on the _Finalizer_.

Part of the massive cradle of girders that would hold the reactor in its containment was being carefully offloaded from its freighter’s cargo bay: a curved section of what looked like comically oversized basketwork. Hux watched the ponderous ballet of the three tugs guiding the segment clear of the freighter and turning it round on a couple of axes at once. The tugs’ working lights cast great slanting ovals of brightness over the sealed and corrostop-coated metal as they maneuvered --

Something wasn’t right. 

Hux didn’t know what it was he had seen, or _not_ seen, but something wasn’t right. He turned from the viewport to the officer in charge of monitoring video feeds. “Get me a closeup on that piece of reactor support structure,” he said, sharply. 

“Yes, sir. Screen four, sir.”

These ships had decent cameras, he could say that for them: on the screen the detail of the tugs and their burden was bright and sharp. He watched, eyes narrowed, as the maneuver continued, and when one of the tugs changed position slightly and splashed its lights over the surface of the piece of reactor cradle, he saw clearly what was wrong with the picture. “Stop those tugs,” he said. “Hold position, tell them to stand by.”

The command was relayed, and on the screen all three tugs fired their attitudinal jets to arrest movement and came to a complete, satisfying halt. Hux watched a moment longer, making sure that they weren’t in anyone’s immediate way, and then turned to his informatics officer. “Pull up the shipping manifest on freighter SJ/FO 880.”

“Sir?” 

“I don’t believe the command was unclear.”

“--Yes, sir,” said the officer, going bright pink, and typed rapidly. “Screen two, sir.”

Hux looked at the list. “Scroll down. Keep going -- _there_. Right there. Item twenty. It’s the wrong part.”

He was aware of the uncertain glances being shared between the other people on the bridge. “Give me the central core schematic on the SJFS master planning document. You want section C7 of sheet three. And expedite,” he added, cold and precise. 

This time there was no hesitation in bringing up the image he requested, and Hux stalked over to the screen array. “Notice that on the plans this section of the support structure consists of one solid transverse girder and three perpendicular members. What we’ve actually been sent is a piece that shares the same _dimensions_ but, crucially, is only about half as strong. You can see the rivet lines along the transverse girder where the two sections of it meet in a lap joint.”

He pointed at the shot of the construction tugs and their burden. A double line of pimples ran along the metal surface, thrown into sharp relief by one of the tugs’ floodlights. “This is designed to hold a different reactor model than the one we’re expecting, the same overall containment size but half the total weight, and thus half the dead load on the support structure. If we put _that_ ” -- he tapped the screen displaying the line of rivets -- “into _this_ station and then install the reactor as designed, it is only a matter of time before fatigue cracking begins along those rivet lines. I trust I do not have to draw you a picture.”

There was a shocked silence. Hux sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Inform headquarters that there’s been a mistake. We’re going to have to send this back and wait for the real part. Check the other two freighters to see if they’re carrying the wrong piece too, which I suspect they are, and start recalculating the schedule to include another delay.”

He got a chorus of _yes, sir_ s. And one tentative “Sir?”

Hux turned to find the informatics officer looking at him nervously. “Yes?” he said. 

“How did you know that, sir? That it was the wrong part?”

“It’s my project, which means that it’s my job to know things like that,” he said. “And I’ve studied the plans somewhat, ah, extensively. Someone would have noticed sooner or later, I have no doubt, but better to notice it _before_ we have a sudden structural failure. From now on, I want everyone to keep a closer eye on the shipping manifests and double-check them against the manufacturer’s specs. If this can happen once, it can happen again, and there are a lot more critical parts we need to install correctly.”

 

#

 

For the first fortnight after he'd taken the _Dark Heart_ out into the more-distant parts of the galaxy, Ren had almost managed to enjoy himself. If he didn't think too hard.

The ship felt empty without Hux – staggeringly, strangely so, a mechanism running ungoverned, still keeping perfect time but with no assurance that future deviations would be corrected – so he had spent as little time on it as possible. Instead he'd gone down onto a series of miniature unpleasantnesses: Snoke's list of ever-more-remote planetoids, each with an ever-more-flimsily-rumored collection of Force artifacts to be retrieved. The entire business felt disturbingly like doing the shopping at some planet's bazaar. He resented it. Of course he resented it –

But finding the artifacts was easier than he'd expected it to be. He was discovering that he could simply listen to the wavering-bright patterns in the Force and then follow them to the source of their distortions, and he wasn't entirely sanguine about _why._ The simplest explanation was that he'd taken to carrying the dark half of the Janus diadem along with him, wrapped in two layers of black gauze and tucked inside his shirt, where it hummed and pulled at the dark side of the Force and – made finding other distortions easier, in comparison, especially artifacts that were imbued with light. That was what Snoke had told him to use it for, on the asteroid before he had sent him away from Hux – and surely that was a _sufficient_ explanation for his new facility as an amateur archaeologist. The dark crown was the most powerful Force artifact he'd ever been near. At night, sleeping in his too-solitary quarters with the crown a good six feet away from him on his desk, he could still feel it hum inside his bones, like he'd curled up next to a generator.

Somewhere, too far away for Ren to easily comprehend, it called to its other half. Ren could hear it – see it, sometimes, in the ripples in the Force, a long near-invisible line reaching out, and he _wished_ he could follow it all the way to Hux's communications array – but the universe was so large.

He had not ever been quite this aware of _how_ large.

But even the effects of the dark crown weren't enough to explain how, searching for a ruined Jedi outpost on the waterless desert moon of the Derya system, for a long moment Ren had felt aware of the entire satellite. Every meter of it described in the flowing currents of the Force, and he himself a single point within that pattern: a point emitting more dark than light, but not entirely dark, aware of all the infinitesimal pulls of Force-charged objects and people, wherever they were on the moon.

It had been overwhelming. He'd needed to sit down and pull his mind back into his mind, piece by piece, dizzy with expanse, the desert sand blowing over his boots. His throat was full of grit, and the corners of his eyes were damp, and he'd wondered if he would dissolve entirely into that new _encompassing_ comprehension. He'd wished, harder than he had known he could wish for someone, for Hux to have been there to ask, infuriating and perfect, if he was all right.

If that experience (and at least it had only happened the once) was a result of being more balanced between light and dark, Ren wasn't sure what to do with it, or what it would ultimately mean. He felt entirely alone. All the singing points of Force-charge, like little stars, were not talking to _him_ – there was no one he could even _ask_ – there hadn't _been_ a balanced Force user in millennia. Even when Snoke used to describe what Ren might be capable of, it had always been theoretical, and mostly about explosive firepower. Not this kind of vertigo-inducing _perception_.

Even so, it had made gathering up a substantial store of Jedi and pseudo-Jedi artifacts much easier. Ren had more of them than Snoke knew to want, which was the entire point.

Insurrections, it turned out, needed a remarkable amount of ready capital. Ren had spent most of his life determinedly ignoring things like payroll or supply acquisition or even _how expensive is it to bribe customs officials into not reporting the movement of half of the Tarkin fleet_ – but when he and Hux and Phasma had sketched out the barest lines of their plan, their lack of an independent source of funds had been particularly glaring.

Thus, here Ren was, down on the planet Derya V, in the offices of the shipping magnate and sometime smuggler Nadja Beq, lit only by the white-sand gleam of that desert moon coming in through the windows.

Ren flicked the switch on his lightsaber. The bright sparking hum of the extending blade came to a halt precisely two inches away from Nadja Beq's throat, and stopped there. She didn't flinch – admirable, he supposed – but her face turned a sickly grey-green that contrasted badly with the saber's reflected red light, and her hands scrabbled open and shut on her desk.

"Yes, Lord Ren," she said, strangled. "I'm sure we can make an arrangement to – dispose of – the artifact you've acquired, to your profit –"

"Discreetly," Ren added. "Your excellent reputation precedes you, Magnate Beq, but I am interested in your less-official capacities for generating revenue in this particular case."

"Discreetly, as you like, can you please shut that thing off –"

Ren did. Nadja Beq exhaled hard through her teeth and rubbed at the skin of her neck where it had just barely begun to pinken from heat. "You don't have to threaten me," she said, thinly, "there's a substantial market for these "Jedi" artifacts, whether or not they're real."

"I assure you," Ren said, sibilant behind the mask, "they are very real. You may inform your customers."

Nadja Beq screwed her eyes shut, opened them again. "All right," she said. "Show me the merchandise, Lord Ren, and we'll get down to business."

Some time later he had more credits than he precisely knew what to do with – spending them wasn't his problem, spending them was supposed to be _Hux's_ problem – and a series of excruciating appointments with some of Derya V's local aristocracy, who were next on Snoke's list of persons who might have acquired Jedi artifacts and kept them as family heirlooms, all unknowing, for generations. They – the aristocrats, not the artifacts – were recalcitrant, self-important, and easy to intimidate via minor acts of property destruction.

He was no good at politics. Politics wasn't what he was for.

Ren could not imagine what Snoke was going to _do_ with all of the former heirlooms, when he had them. Most of them were Light-side, and minor in power, so much so that they didn't even burn Ren's hands when he picked them up. They were decorative enough, certainly – garish, even –

When the trooper found him in Derya V's market district he nearly took her head off with the lightsaber. She'd come up so _quietly_ , and she wasn't wearing her whites; just a First Order tab on her collar and a vaguely familiar face. She was one of Phasma's squadron. Ren was glad he hadn't killed her. He'd feel – _awful_ , awful about accidentally hurting one of their own.

(And when had he begun to think of the troopers as _his_ , as well as Hux's?)

She held out a message capsule, and said, "With the compliments of the General, Lord Ren," and then he was _really_ glad he hadn't hurt her. He took it. It burned in his hand, unread, the desire to tear it open was so strong. To hear from Hux.

"I would send something back, Trooper," he managed, glad for the vocoder-distortion of the mask and how it disguised the tremor in his voice. "Will you be on-planet long?"

"A day? Two days at most. This is a refueling stop, sir. You weren't easy to locate. If you want to find me I'll be in the main hangar at the port, I've booked passage on the _Carnelian Lights_ –"

"But you'll be heading back towards the General."

"Eventually. When it doesn't look surprising, sir."

They were all being so careful. It was infuriating, and slow, and necessary, and Ren did not know if he could bear it. "Good," he said. "I'll find you tomorrow at your ship."

She nodded. Most of the fear had slipped out of her face. "Yes, Lord Ren."

Ren had to say _something_ , something to convey his gratitude for the message-capsule. "Well done," he tried, trying to remember how Hux made these people look at him like he had hung all the stars.

The trooper quite nearly smiled.

 

#

> _Hux:_
> 
> _I listened to the Umir – three times – and it's very beautiful but I don't see what it has to do with my hair. That's the problem, isn't it. I can turn it up as loud as the bone-conductor feeds in my mask will go (look, I told you the mask has technical specifications that are practical, you have to use soundproofing if you want to hear your music this loudly) and it still isn't the same as having you play it for me. It doesn't have the same effect. I don't feel –_
> 
> _I don't know how to describe it. I've never described it before, with words. I have never had reason, and if you were here instead of having sent me this piece of flimsiplast in a self-destroying hand-carried capsule ( theatrics, General? – see, this is the difficulty of words, I can underline all I like and I still don't know if you are going to understand when I'm being sarcastic) If you were here I could just show you what I mean, and have you play me the music properly, and not bother with underlining or sentences or giving this back to that trooper so she can hand-carry it back to you over parsecs._
> 
> _I'm not good at this either._
> 
> _I have no idea who has to pay for the things I have destroyed with my lightsaber, it's not my job to know that._
> 
> _(I have destroyed exactly nothing that would require you to rewrite your spreadsheets or requisition more supplies or man-hours. Neither an ostentatious cabinet in the local governor's office nor the door to his locked vault are First Order property. Besides, the door deserved it and the cabinet was ugly. The governor listened better for having lost it.)_
> 
> _I miss you. I don't want to write this down, I want to see your face while I describe it, and kiss you if you glare at me and even if you don't – I've never been so perturbed by absence. I am desperately tired of it and it's only been a month._
> 
> _If you thought that warning me off listening to Phasma being concerned about you would make me less concerned, you were mistaken. Revise your estimations of how much sleep you need. I'm almost sure the galaxy can manage without an extra hour of your attention, though I'm not entirely convinced I can._
> 
> _Send more letters._
> 
> _\- R_

#

 

It felt a little ridiculous to be carrying around Ren’s letter tucked inside his shirt, under his uniform tunic, but the alternative was _not_ to be carrying it around; leaving it locked up carefully in his music-box with the gold crown. Where it would presumably be safer than on his person, but Hux found that he was unwilling to be separated from the only thing he owned which Kylo Ren had _made_. Running his fingers over the surface of the flimsiplast, feeling the dents and ridges where the stylus had bitten into the surface with Ren’s energetic handwriting, was the only thing that made the constant dull numb ache in his mind go away for a while. He had not been able to play much of his music, for a while now: the box beneath his desk lay untouched. Several times he’d put something on and had to stab at the datapad to shut it off again almost immediately, squeezing his eyes shut against the sudden somatic flood of _memory_ , of _need_ : so much of his collection was now permanently linked with Ren, and listening to the music shook him, drubbed him with the fact of Ren’s absence. So he moved in silence: for the first time since the age of fourteen he spent his free time in silence, and carried the letter with him wherever he went. 

Six weeks into construction, the structure of the operations/control and habitation sector of the station was complete, but the internal fittings were still in progress. Nevertheless Hux had moved from the freighter to the station as soon as it was feasible to do so, and promptly set about familiarizing himself with every inch of it, cross-referencing with the plans stored in his head. Since the misadventure of the reactor cradle, there had been several other instances of the wrong part being delivered, and he was not sure whether this was due to sheer incompetence or an active campaign on someone’s part to bugger up his project. On the whole he thought it was more likely to be the former, but in case it _wasn’t_ , he stepped up his vigilance a little further, and was reasonably confident that he had not missed anything significant. 

Once he had moved on board the station, his officers had followed suit, and the habitation sector was almost fully occupied. It was a larger complement than he’d had on the _Dark Heart_ , but not by very much. 

Hux was down to about four hours of sleep a night, if he was lucky, and so he did what he had always done when sleep was impossible, which was _walk_. The design of the station precluded him from getting up a proper stalk at all: he had to be content with merely walking, at a normal human pace, through the chambers around the ring of the torus. By now everyone was used to the fact that General Hux could appear at any hour of the day or night, without warning, to inspect what they were up to -- and along with the pale, calculating gaze, occasionally make surprisingly helpful comments. 

(He never shouted at people. He didn’t _have_ to shout: he merely eviscerated foolish errors with cold and precise phrases that cut more deeply than a raised voice ever could have. Once was enough, for most people. You did not want to have Hux do that to you _ever again_.)

He had written back to Ren, crumpling up three attempts before he was even slightly satisfied with the results, which in itself was a little exercise in tiresome logistics: the discarded beginnings could not merely be thrown away but must be secured or destroyed, and he had no desire to hang on to the evidence of his own incompetence. In the version of the letter he finally sent, Hux had neatly avoided any mention of walking around and around the station through the long sleepless nights, nor made reference to the fact that he had not been able to bear listening to music: Ren didn’t need to know about either of those things. He had sketched out, roughly, in words, the image of someone who was handling this entire situation better than he was; as well, in fact, as he would _like_ to be. Writing it hurt, because thinking about Ren hurt, but _not_ writing was inconceivable.

It would take the letter _weeks_ to reach Ren, and many more before Hux could expect a reply. He leaned harder into the work, doing more, doing as much as he could, trying to keep his mind off things, and it worked just _enough_ for him to go on trying harder. 

They had just finished installing the central computer core and begun the job of laying the miles and miles of cable that would carry the signals to and from the antenna arrays when the entire station caught a nasty cold. Hux had spent enough time on starships and stations to recognize the inevitability of the thing; once someone had brought it on board, it was only a matter of time before it spread throughout the entire population. His informatics officer was the first to succumb, and then his chief of engineering, and the rest of his command crew followed. Even Phasma hadn’t been able to escape: she spent three days grouchily sneezing before returning to her usual unshakeable self. 

Hux reflected that it could have been a great deal worse: at least this was only a respiratory infection, rather than one of the miserable rotaviruses that were capable of sweeping through a ship like wildfire. There had been a few days on one of his first starship assignments that he never, ever wanted to repeat. This was just an inconvenience, and a passing one at that. Most people worked through it, relaying orders in a croak: for a few days the station’s business was conducted with a background chorus of coughing and sneezing. The medical droids were kept busy handing out salicylin and antihistamines and lozenges.

And then there was Hux. He was one of the few people on board who actually ran a temperature, although this fact was not shared with anybody; he’d lasted longer than he personally expected before coming down with it, and possibly because of that it hit him rather hard. For two days he was really miserable, wearing his hat and a scarf as well as the heavy coat and gloves as he went about his duties -- of course he wasn’t going to take time off, he had _work_ to do, cold or no cold -- and ignoring people’s expressions with grim determination. The headache and sore muscles and prickling sensitivity of the fever were annoying, but the stupid cough was really the worst part. Not only did the cough make it difficult for Hux to actually talk to people and tell them what to do in a clear and concise fashion, it also brought up memories of Felthor, and inevitably of Ren, and Ren _healing_ him, and that hurt a lot worse than anything else did. He went through bags of horrible blue menthol-flavored cough drops, and they killed what little appetite he’d had to begin with. He drank a lot of tea.

After those two days, however, the worst seemed to be over; the fever and aches went away, taking the sinus congestion with them, and Hux could go about his business without shivering unhappily under all his extra layers. A week after it had begun, the station was more or less back to normal, and Hux could stop worrying about people. (It had been _weird_ , and upsetting, to see Phasma unwell.) 

But he couldn’t seem to shake the cough. It was much better than it had been, but the damn thing refused to go away entirely, and Hux’s consumption of horrible menthol lozenges had become a habit. Phasma had taken to carrying them around for him as well, which he appreciated, embarrassment aside. After two weeks he was still coughing, and had more or less accepted it as an unpleasant but inescapable fact of existence; it was difficult to imagine a world in which he _didn’t_ have to cough. It wasn’t doing much for the insomnia, either.

Alone, in his quarters, he unfolded Ren’s letter for the thousandth time -- noticing with a kind of angry ache that the flimsiplast was beginning to wear through at the fold-lines -- and sat down to re-read it, again, to repeat the words he already had by heart. It was impossible now to remember what it was he had actually said to Ren in his last letter, weeks ago. Something about the project, about their progress, something relatively upbeat. He could only hope, hope with all his heart, that they had been good words; that they had been the _right_ words, or close enough to right. It hurt to picture Ren doing just what he was doing, rereading Hux’s own letter, and he wanted so _much_ for it to be _of use_ to Ren. Wanted it at least to be a pleasant thing to have with him, in exile.

 

#

> _Ren:_
> 
> _I've been sitting here for almost half an hour trying to locate and arrange words properly, and I still can't get it to work right, but in the Umir slow movement about ten minutes in when the strings go all dark and musing and the melody curls back on itself, I am reminded – not directly, not in any logical progression, but reminded in what I suppose is a vague form of synesthesia – of the heaviness and richness of your hair, how thick and wavy it is, how the curls at your neck can be stretched out and spring back over and over again. And before you ask me why I like that, I will say, again, as I have repeatedly said, because it is yours. _
> 
> _Of the things you could be chopping up with that showpiece of yours, I admit that a governor's furniture (and a vault door: I presume that it contained the thing you were there to fetch, compliments on the efficiency) is of low concern to me. Unlike this wretched project: someone sent us – by accident or design I do not know – some fairly important structural support members that are designed for a completely different reactor model, which are rated for about half the dead load they would have to support in this installation. I happened to notice before they actually went in, which saved some bother and potential structural failure, but it set us back a week while the wrong parts were sent back and exchanged for the right ones. And so on. There is insufficient coffee on this station. _
> 
> _Incidentally I think you underestimate my capacity to detect sarcasm in text form. The message capsule is, due to its very archaic nature, one of the more secure methods of communication, and don't even attempt to imply that terrifying troopers into dispatch-rider duty is something you don't positively enjoy._
> 
> _Phasma is used to worrying about squadrons at a time; her capacity is greatly expanded. I'm quite all right._
> 
> _I could sleep better if you were here, though. I could do almost everything better, if you were here._
> 
> _I'm getting maudlin, and I do maudlin very badly indeed in person and far worse in words, so I will stop, but write back to me. Waiting for your letters is like waiting for...the best kind of orders, I suppose. _
> 
> _H_

#

 

Ysil system, high season. Too hot to think. The sky an invincible and merciless blue. Ysil Nine, the largest city, was a rough jewel set in scrub desert. Ren had taken a room in a grand and slowly-disintegrating hotel, a relic from the high Imperial days. Its balcony was thick with pink flowers, their petals like spikes, as long as his hands. According to Snoke's list, somewhere in this city a man who called himself the Divine Chalda had pieces of the original setting of the Eye of Khi that he'd been using as some sort of religious object – but Chalda, Divine or not, had walked into the desert more than two decades ago and left a bewildering set of cryptic notes as to his current whereabouts in the city's public archive as some sort of replacement for his presence. If he had the setting for the Eye, he'd taken it with him.

The _Dark Heart_ hovered in orbit, and Ren was spending his days in a stifling, dusty municipal office, trying to decide if Chalda was even worth going _after_. His hair stuck to the back of his neck under the mask; sweat dripped down his spine in endless, miserable trickles.

Worse: four systems and thirty-nine days between the first of Hux's letters finding Ren and the next. _Too long_. Worse still: how this letter, curled safe in its travel-scuffed message capsule, hadn't even come to him from the hand of one of their troopers. Instead a smallish person of a species Ren had never before encountered, pale-eyed and many-limbed, brought it to him in the lobby of his hotel. They demanded _payment on delivery_ – which Ren obliged – and even under all the threat Ren could muster, persisted in knowing only that they had received the letter and the request to find Kylo Ren and hand it over to him from a man who had claimed to be a Coruscanti merchant slumming it on a long-range transport, trying to get away from growing rumors of Resistance activity. Where _that_ man had gotten it, or if he was one of their own in disguise, Ren had no way of knowing. Nor did he have an easy method of sending on his reply. He'd written it in a frantic, near-ecstatic haste – scrawled so hard on the flimsiplast that the stylus-marks warped the other side and he'd had to purchase a new sheet from the municipal archivist – spilled words like they were water, as if he was talking to Hux as he wrote, and almost, almost for a moment he had convinced himself that he _was_ , as if Hux would read what he was saying instantaneously, and begin to reply –

The fever of composition passed off as soon as he'd found some sort of conclusion and signed his name. Afterward he felt scoured-open, meaninglessly upset, more lonely than he knew what to do with.

He resealed the letter in the capsule, reset the codes. At Ysil Nine's spaceport, he paid for a courier who promised to get it into the First Order's internal mail, as quickly as her ship could make the hyperspace jump to a more-populated sector, and after that Ren just had to hope that mail would still be being _forwarded_ to General Hux out on a half-built communications array. That their conspiracy hadn't advanced to the point where anything addressed to Hux would be opened and sent immediately to Snoke instead –

Fear was as dizzying as the heat, pooling in Ren's chest. And yet he couldn't bring himself to snatch the capsule back. Couldn't make himself _not_ try to tell Hux that he was still out here, somewhere, no matter how large the galaxy was turning out to be.

The fear was still with him when he set off into the desert the next day; a prickling, useless, fretful thing that made food unappetizing and inaction impossible. Ren left at first light. He had a rudimentary map compiled from his sufferings in the municipal archive, a great store of water in canteens draped across him like holster-belts, and Hux's letters wrapped in with the dark crown, close to his chest – he couldn't leave them in the hotel. Something might _happen_ to them.

Even at dawn the heat came down on his shoulders, a vast weighted hand. Despite the mask's filters the air tasted strange, metallic: it dried his mouth instantaneously, pressing down on his tongue. The horizon wavered, a tremulous yellowing white-blue line. The Divine Chalda's anchoritic habitation was – probably – two hours walk, due east. If he was fast he'd be there and back before midday. At midday this desert might try to kill him.

It was mostly dirt and pebbles. No sand dunes. Spiky, strange foliage, low to the ground, all tangles and thorns and the absurd pink spikes of the flowers, the only color in the world that wasn't heat-bleached to greys. Ren walked fast, and the scrub crunched under his boots. As the sun rose, a vast impinging disk, he was forced to take drinks of water every ten minutes. The metal of his mask would have been too hot to touch bare-handed, and this was the only good thing about having worn gloves into a desert. He felt as if he was slowly disintegrating into sweat. It was a relief when the constant, bone-shivering hum of the dark crown began to resolve itself into what he recognized now as the _drawing_ of one Force-radiant artifact to another. The shimmering air was full of lines – patterns – if he _looked_ –

It was easier with the mask off, even if the sun on his uncovered face felt like being struck. He veered left. East-by-southeast.

He wasn't _exactly_ dizzy. He was just not entirely aware of where the edges of his body met the edges of the air. A kind of intoxication of temperature. The scrub vegetation faded away to nothing, to cracked flat planes of dirt, the sky so blue it was white, and he thought he saw a half-ruined hovel, a sketch of tumbled stonework on the horizon, a fit dwelling place for ascetics or the sort of madman who would willingly walk out of a city and into _this_ , and made himself hurry toward it, the hems of his tunic dragging in the desert dust.

It did not get closer as he moved. Instead the dirt under his feet turned the same white as the sky, reeked of – rotting fish, of the _seaside._ Salt. A salt flat.

There was a lake here, once, but the desert had devoured it. The desert drank it sip by sip and left only salt, burnt everything clean under the killing light of this system's sun, and Ren fell nerveless to his knees, a pool of black gauze on tacky grey-white salt crystals. Next to him were bones, rising from the cracked crystals. A salt-skeleton that could have been a drowned man, if anyone could find enough water to drown in on Ysil. Around his neck was a sunburst of metal, encrusted with greyish saline tumors. It sang and vibrated and the lines of the Force shivered around it. Once this was a lake. Once, and the edges of time were thin where the Force is strongest, Ren knew that, he'd known that since he was too small to know any better, gone out into the dreamy concentrated meditation that _invites_ the light in to burn – and perhaps the Divine Chalda did drown – perhaps he was still drowning now –

Tears leaked from the corners of Ren's eyes and dried instantly to rime. Perhaps he was drowning too (the Force was not _kind,_ the Force was merciless like the sky, the Force was too large to be kind) or perhaps he was merely drowning in sunlight, waterless, the way men could in these scar-bright places in the galaxy. He reached and took the sunburst necklace from its dead host – the chain snapped easily, rusted. It burned his fingers. It was _hot_. Sunlight. Force-light.

If he stayed here he would die, he thought. The lake would come back and take him up.

He stumbled to his feet, stumbled backwards, squeezed his eyes shut against the vision (if it was a vision) a lake, reeds, the call of cranes. Another time.

When he staggered back into Ysil Nine he was shock-white, sunstroke-pale, not sweating. Too far gone for that. He retreated into the dim confines of his hotel room, too dizzy to think, unable to decide if what he'd seen was heatstruck mirage or Force vision, or what a Force vision of the dead and a vanished lake would even _mean_. Drank water, was sick, drank water again until he could keep it down. He refused to collapse of heat delirium on this system, too far from everything. There was a flat, white blister across his palm where he'd picked up the sunburst frame for the Eye of Khi.

He pressed that palm flat against the flimsiplast of Hux's letters, imagined Hux taking his hand, so vividly that he thought he might shake apart.

 

#

 

Hux had only just returned to his quarters for the night -- not that he would stay there, probably -- when his personal comm chimed in a particular series of tones. Hastily he locked the door and thumbed the channel open: this was not a call he could keep waiting. He hoped like hell that Letitia Calpurnia Tarkin was not calling him to say she had changed her mind about the fleet.

"Hux," he said, and winced at the hoarseness. 

"Ah," said Lady Tarkin, as clear over light-years of space as she'd been across the room from him on Eriadu, "I see you have got your communications array functional. How pleasant."

Hux thought wearily that it didn't matter if you couldn't _see_ the cheekbones, you could still somehow _hear_ them. It was like being spoken to by a handful of knives. _Be careful_ , he told himself. _You need her rather a lot just at the moment._

"Lady Tarkin," he said. "A pleasure to hear from you. Yes: construction is proceeding almost on schedule. About a quarter of the arrays are now fully activated."

"And transmitting like anything, even on these rarefied frequencies. Should I offer you congratulations, General? Or would that be salt in the wound?"

Hux coughed despite himself. "Our current signal strength is at about one fourth of rated capacity," he said. "When the station is complete, our transmitters will be brought up to full power. Your congratulations are most kind." He didn't add _and I believe we have already reached wound salt-level saturation; further addition will have no effect._

There was an infinitesimal pause, as if Lady Tarkin was resettling her opinions of him into some unknowable configuration. Then she said, "To be sure. Of course, this is not a social call, General. I am delighted to report that most of the funds your -- associate -- has so generously provided have been profitably used to bring our ships up to modern standards of both firepower and safety."

That eased some of the tightness in his chest, even if _your associate_ made his face go hot for a moment. "Excellent," he said. "You've had them install the new 10-series thorilide turbolaser emplacements fore and aft? I would suggest that your people increase the coolant system capacity past the manufacturer's set standard, those have a tendency to heat up very fast, and there have been a few power-cooling mismatch transients in some of the Order's ships." 

Hux paused. "Not to impugn the skill and competence of your workmen," he added. 

"I'm sure you wouldn't want to do that," Letitia said, a delicate little ice-bridge of a phrase. Then she sighed -- Hux could hear the thin exhale pindrop-clear; his communications array was at least _functioning properly_ \-- and seemed to acquire a certain wry briskness. "It _has_ been a long time since we outfitted our fleet. I will send your recommendations on to the foreman, General. Though there remains the problem of _manning_ all these ships. I have emptied the port of Eriadu looking for marginal competence, and the barrel's bottom is quite scraped."

Hux sat back in the chair with his hand over his eyes, amazingly glad he didn't have to do this over a vidscreen, for several reasons. "Ah, yes," he said. "The perennial problem of recruitment. What sort of numbers are we looking at, in terms of manpower needed?" It was actually very easy to recruit soldiers: you just...had to do it when they were infants, and unable to protest on their own behalf. The First Order's troopers were trained from a very, very young age. That was not a modality that could be applied to his current situation, and so he pushed it away and opened up his mental library of strategies.

"Two-thirds of the fleet is at operational, but not ideal capacity,” said Lady Tarkin. “The rest will not make it more than a parsec without a significant increase in available manpower, not to mention some people adequately trained in operating all of these new gunnery towers we have been installing."

Hux tried to remember the manifest on the ships in the Tarkin fleet. They were ex-Imperial stock, mostly, ten of them, in varying sizes: he knew they had at least one _Victory-II_ SD, which, hells, was only half the size of the old ImpStar Deuce, which itself was half the size of the _Finalizer._

_This is impossible,_ he thought, and then grimly _but I have to make it possible, somehow._ "I see," he said. "I will...consider options, for sourcing crew. And pilots. I assume your starfighters are also assorted models." He stifled a cough, wondering where he was going to find that kind of volume.

"Quite assorted," Lady Tarkin said, "but in their great majority TIE fighters, of varying vintage. Are you quite all right, General?"

"That makes it easier," he said, "the TIE design hasn't changed a great deal, although the ones they're using in the Order are rather faster and more maneuverable. But a pilot who can fly a TIE can more or less fly a TIE no matter what." Gods, he was glad she couldn't _see_ him, or the face he made. He would need to work harder on control. "I'm quite well, I assure you," he told her. "Although I appreciate your concern."

"Good. It wouldn't do to have our General --" she could sound so _insidiously_ possessive "--out of commission. Did you have some specific plan for recruitment? Perhaps I ought to send my niece out on social calls. It has been so long since poor Juliana has had an opportunity to visit the other grand families of the Empire."

_I wonder_ , Hux thought, _if when this is all over I will wake up to find "Property of House Tarkin" tattooed somewhere on me. I would not be at all surprised._ Aloud he said "It would be greatly appreciated if your niece could make a few visits. One of the reasons I am so pleased to have your support in this matter, Lady Tarkin, is the circle of aristocracy to which House Tarkin belongs, and the network of acquaintance and friendship with the other noble Houses. Meanwhile I will consider recruitment strategies."

Lady Tarkin's amused chuckle, in the dark over the comms, was like the distant falling pebbles that heralded an avalanche. "I'm sure you will, General Hux. And I'll see to it that Juliana gets her marching orders. Is there anything else?"

"I don't believe so, at present," Hux said. "Thank you, Lady Tarkin. The station should be completed close to on schedule; you should expect to see much more powerful hyperwave transmission on most channels within the next two months. Is there any information you require from me at this point? And may I request that I be kept updated on both Honorable Tarkin's discussions and the state of the fleet, if and when any changes occur?"

"You're entirely welcome. And now that we know these frequencies are operational, I'm sure you'll be hearing from us whenever necessary." Another one of those tiny, considering pauses; Hux could imagine the slight narrowing of Lady Tarkin's eyes, over her tea. "Do tell us when you've decided what you want to _do_ with your station. Or if you find yourself in sudden need of being referred to by new titulature. Goodnight, General." A click; and the channel closed.

Hux stared at the silent comm, barely noticing when his cough shook him, thoughts very far away indeed. He had to...come up with an awful lot of people, and they had to be relatively useful people, and he didn't _know_ how long he had to do it in; that was the worst of this, so many variables beyond his control, so much he didn't _know_. 

For a long time after Lady Tarkin had cut the connection he could hear her knife-edged voice in his head. _Do tell us when you've decided what you want to do with your station._

He wished he had an answer that he himself could believe.

 

#

 

Saradar: hovering uneasily at the edge of First Order and New Republic space, a well-populated, long-inhabited planet, just lately shifting toward a more substantial commitment to the Order. The shift in local atmosphere was, Ren assumed, unsurprising. Blow up most of the Republic's government, cause a certain amount of centripetal destabilization at its edges. In late autumn Saradar glistened under damp skies, tall sleek concrete and steel architecture full of narrow, bright-lit windows. The only greenery was imprisoned in city parks and internal gardens. After Ysil, though, Ren was happy enough to have ended up somewhere that had regular weather which included both clouds and measurable rainfall, even if he had only brought the _Dark Heart_ into orbit around Saradar because he was required to attend a diplomatic fundraiser on Snoke's behalf.

Everyone in this room was extremely decorative and had eight titles, all of which Ren had contrived to forget immediately upon hearing them. He wasn't even able to get sufficiently drunk to take the edge off his impatience: the mask prevented imbibing of any kind.

He'd never liked this sort of thing. He had in fact made a point of not going to them for _years_ : they were dull, full of both impenetrable conversations about subjects he had never had any interest in, and people who all seemed to understand how to talk about nothing at all at extreme length while glittering at one another. If Ren _had_ to make an appearance, he went in full regalia, mask on, lightsaber at his hip, and stood around in corners _daring_ anyone to come bother him, and no one usually did. If he could have avoided this one he would have, but it had seemed more dangerous than he wanted to risk, just now: to so directly disobey Snoke for the sake of one evening of peace, when he was engaged in a much deeper and more fundamental betrayal.

There was a continuous strangeness to knowing that he _had already_ committed that betrayal. Snoke didn't know – he was almost, almost sure that Snoke had not stolen this most-central secret from his mind, and was trying as best he could to not imagine that Snoke both _knew_ and was _waiting for them to incriminate themselves –_ and thus this interminable embassy party. But no matter what the galaxy might think, seeing him show up to sneer at a company of minor diplomats, there was no longer any question of the location of his loyalties. He'd given them all to Hux: handed himself over in the dark, whole and entire. If there were hands around his heart he knew who they belonged to.

Thinking of Hux helped and didn't help, all at the same time. In this excruciatingly dull company, to imagine Hux sweeping through the room like a knife was a sweet, longing sort of pain.

Ren was not expecting a hand to land firmly just above his elbow. He spun; the hand remained precisely where it was, _touching him_ , and also attached to a woman of nearly his own height, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with cheekbones that could cut glass. She smiled. The effect was akin to being smiled at by a demure shark.

"Lord Ren," said Juliana Tarkin – for that was absolutely who she had to be, he'd plucked her image out of Hux's memory back on the _Dark Heart_ – "if you would be so kind as to go out onto the balcony with me; I find the position of the stars quite remarkable and would appreciate your expertise."

He was abruptly reminded of just how useful the mask _was_. No one could see his expression, or the sharp heat in his cheeks that he was sure would be visible from across the entire ballroom. What did she _want_? What would all of these strangers think if he – went out onto a balcony, was that a _euphemism_ – with her? Why in all space had she not let go of his arm?

"Honorable Tarkin," he managed. The mask's vocoder accomplished _sepulchral_ for him without much effort. "I'm not an expert in star charts. Perhaps you want an astrogator."

"But you're right here," said Juliana. There was nothing but steel in her murmuring. He reached, dipped into the upper layers of her mind: it was like looking at a branching decision tree constructed entirely of smoke. Her fingers tightened in sharp rebuke. "Come along, won't you, Lord Ren?"

He went.

The balcony overlooked one of those peculiar Saradari internal gardens, a tiny plot of open earth full of half-size willow-trees, their branches laden and dripping with dark leaves almost ready to fall. There were a truly unconscionable number of spangled stars above their heads – this part of the galaxy was a wealth of tiny systems all near one another – and Juliana Tarkin knew precisely how to stand so that the sky-glitter reflected her jewelry and the champagne flute _she_ got to drink out of. She stared moodily into the middle distance. Ren hated everything in the universe with vicious determination. This was like being trapped inside an overly-directed holoproj.

"What do you want," he said, finally, if only to begin getting it over with.

"Contrive to look entranced by our surroundings, Lord Ren," Juliana said, gazing determinedly at the willow-branches, "or perhaps as if you are prepared to dismember me with your famous lightsaber, and under that flimsy façade be so kind as to acknowledge that I am your – contact – in this region of the galaxy, and that a quarter of our esteemed fellows back in the ballroom are thinking quite earnestly of no longer bending their necks to Snoke just because he offers more security than the exploded bits of the New Republic."

Politics, Ren found himself thinking again, were not what he was for. Politics were what he had _Hux_ for. There was something entirely unfair about how _he_ was able to move freely around the galaxy and Hux, who would be so much better at this, was trapped at its very edge.

He took a step inward. It was not _impossible_ to loom over the Honorable Tarkin, just more effort than usual. "And am I obliged to you for this – as-of-yet hypothetical – suite of defections?"

The edges of that branched-smoke mind tinged ice-white, some of the tendrils of how Juliana considered options withering up with a fear she seemed to bite off and excise, amputated emotion. A peculiar way of thinking. She said, "Feel obliged once I've won your General his allies. For which, Lord Ren, I will need the funds you have been gathering."

"A purely monetary arrangement, I see."

"You did come to us," Juliana said. There was no trace of that clouding, white fear in her voice. She hid it well. She took a sip of her drink. "If you wanted allies who were less practical, you should have picked a different House to suborn."

Ren dipped into his sash; came up with the credit chips he'd gotten in exchange for smuggled petty Jedi artifacts. "I expect that sense of obligation to begin in short order," he said, and dropped the chips into her waiting palm.

"Thank you, Lord Ren. You can go back to being bored now, if you like."

He _so_ wanted to throw the Honorable Tarkin off the balcony and into the willow-branches. But it would doubtlessly spoil her plans, and if she was helping them – if she could win them even a fraction of what they needed – he would grit his teeth inside his mask and be glad that at least he didn't have to smile.

 

#

 

It was impossible to spend one’s entire waking consciousness focused on the construction of a thing, to understand and know that thing intimately from its structural support through the layers and layers of cabling and conduits that formed shells around that structure, through the open spaces where people spent their days and nights, through the multiply-redundant hull shielding plates, and not feel just a _flicker_ of attachment. Impossible, but only just. 

Hux realized, with greater and greater clarity as time went by, how much he had actually cared for the _Dark Heart_ without knowing it. Even now he could immediately call to mind the numbers on that slightly imbalanced engine’s thrust and the most efficient pattern of OMS burns needed to compensate for the off-true thrust vectoring. It had been months and months and _months_ now, and he still fought off an instant flutter of alarm each time he woke because this station lacked the constant low-grade vibration of a functioning starship: complete stillness, on a working ship, meant either _rigged for sensor blackout_ or _something is badly wrong._

The complexity of the antenna arrays was the only thing really capable of keeping enough of his attention occupied, these days. Logistics had ceased to be interestingly difficult as soon as the structural build and main fitting-out had been completed: now it was just a question of installing all the equipment. Hux thought vaguely that it might actually be possible to meet Snoke’s absurd eight-month deadline after all: his people were more efficient than he had expected them to be. But the arrays would take the rest of the build time: first installing all the antennas and then testing and calibrating every single one of them, and re-testing, and stress-testing, before the station could be brought up to full power. They were the only thing about this project that Hux actually found interesting, and making sure they were up to the task was his responsibility. He could potentially feel proud of that, in a vague shapeless kind of way, when it was done: it would be a thing he had achieved, a standard met, a job done. 

He was standing at the station’s north pole, the farthest along one of its two arms that it was possible to get without a vacsuit, about halfway to the tip. Beyond this point, the arm continued as a mast of steel latticework, essentially the same as a ground-based comm tower, identical to the one that formed the station’s south pole. Viewports on either side of an airlock let personnel keep an eye on what was happening amongst the arrays without having to suit up, and it was against one of these viewports that General Hux was -- currently not standing, but leaning. Ever so slightly. 

Already the mast was studded with parabolic dishes, aimed in various directions. They were arranged in a particular pattern which to the untrained eye might have seemed random, but was in fact the result of extremely complicated calculations. Each individual antenna’s boresight was controlled separately, but if commanded to by the central computer could be aligned with its neighbors to act as a phased array. 

Hux was often drawn here, in the dark watches when sleep was impossible but physical fatigue required a pause in his endless walking rounds. Looking out at the latticework that would, in the fullness of time, be completely hidden beneath a bristling crowd of white dishes did not exactly relax him, but it helped a little. The mast, and its purpose, served to confirm to Hux on some primitive level that although the galaxy was huge beyond the capacity of rational thought, it was crisscrossed with a vast network of communications links; that here, if nowhere else in exile, he might possibly be able to _hear_ what was going on. 

He rested his forehead against the cold transparisteel, closing his eyes for a moment. He had forgotten what it was like _not_ to be exhausted, not to ache dully all the time. Forgotten what life had been like when he _hadn’t_ had a cough. Breathing was a conscious activity, a thing he was aware of doing, and Hux couldn’t remember a time when it had not felt like work. The weight of each day was another tiny addition to a vast, crushing heap of time, a thing he carried on his back through the halls and passageways of this station, a weight he was unable to put down -- not that he should want to: it was his weight to carry. Whether he personally cared for this project was irrelevant, because it was his job, his business, and his responsibility. 

Hux was not sure how long he had been leaning there -- sometimes he slipped a little, lost a few minutes, not exactly _asleep_ but not fully awake -- when someone behind him deferentially cleared their throat. He managed not to jump, possibly because that would have required more energy than he could currently spare, and turned to see one of his officers standing at attention a few paces away. _I didn’t even hear her_ , he thought, furious with himself. _I didn’t hear a bloody thing._

Aloud he said “Yes, Lieutenant?” 

“Sir,” she said, and his eyes traveled down her arm to the thing she held even as she spoke the words: “This just arrived for you.”

It was a message-capsule, it was a _scuffed and worn and dented message-capsule_ and it was the most beautiful thing Hux had seen in weeks. He drew breath sharply, in surprise, and of course it caught in his throat, of _course_ it did, and he had to turn aside a little and cough into his fist while he held out his other hand for the capsule. The lieutenant hesitated, taking a step toward him, and Hux -- completely unable to speak -- gave her an impatient _come-on_ gesture. She held the capsule out, and his fingers closed around it: somehow the reality of the object, the undeniable tangible existence of it, came as a physical shock. How long ago had this left Ren’s hands, he thought, dazedly. How old were the words it carried?

The coughing eased enough for him to manage “thank you, that will be all,” and when she had gone Hux took the quickest way back to his quarters, locked the door, half-fell onto the bed and opened the capsule. 

 

#

> _  
> Hux:_
> 
> _I would write to you even if you hadn't told me to. I would, no matter how infuriating words are as compared to the inside of your mind. If I can't have the feel of it – have I told you what you're like? Like a resonant space, a room with a vaulted roof – if I can't have that I can at least imagine what it would feel like to overhear you reading what I write down._
> 
> _I do; I think of what you would think, wherever I am, but the version of you I have made up is not as good as having you in actuality. This planet is all one desert – it is too hot to think – but I imagine you here regardless, I see you like a phantom around corners in the market, I think that if I could only reach out to your mind and tell you wait you would pause and turn and be there in truth, but all the minds I touch are as foreign to me as the sky and the language here._
> 
> _I want you. That's simplest to say. It's not simple at all to feel. Language is inadequate and even if I have paid a courier an exorbitant amount of funds to deliver this message-capsule safely into the Order's mail, I can't write what I want to do._
> 
> _(There are rumors – even this far out on the Rim – that cracks are growing in the Order's control of galactic space. Here on Ysil they blame the Resistance; I am not sure if I should be encouraged or concerned. I can't write – it isn't safe to write more than this, I know it – not being able to tell you what I mean in the silence of our own minds is an endless, endless torment.)_
> 
> _I will worry about you whether you say I ought not to or not. It is my privilege._
> 
> _Please keep writing. I have not been so aware of the vastness of space before now, and I'm not enjoying learning._
> 
> _\- R  
>  _

#

 

 

#

Hux’s officers were not exactly surprised at the order to expedite installation of the longest-range antenna arrays. By now they knew that General Hux’s idea of _on time_ was everyone else’s idea of _early_ , and it was difficult to imagine slacking one’s own duties in the face of the man’s own evident and somewhat alarming work ethic. He wanted the station operational as fast as possible, if not at full strength: that meant rearranging the install schedule to include long- and mid-range arrays concurrently, rather than finishing the short-range antenna complement first. It meant that they wouldn’t have full signal strength on any range -- but that they would be able to receive and transmit, albeit weakly, across the entire scope of the design capability of the station. Presumably there were things being said, somewhere within that design capability, which Hux considered of importance.

The lieutenant who had brought him the message capsule the day before was only reluctantly persuaded to repeat her account of that little encounter: she had found it unsettling, to say the least. “He was just...leaning on the viewport with his eyes closed,” she said, hands wrapped around a cup of the station’s terrible coffee, not looking at her colleagues. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t hear me coming, and it wasn’t as if I was...tiptoeing, or anything. You can hear boots on these floors pretty easily. But he didn’t move at all. Like he was daydreaming, or -- or asleep, or something. And when he did hear me it kind of made him jump a little.”

“He _doesn’t_ sleep,” said a fellow officer. “I was talking to Captain Juha down in engineering and they’ve been timing it, when he does that inspection-round thing. There’s no way he can physically _be_ all the places he is, during all the shifts, and still be getting any sleep. Juha’s pretty sure he’s some kind of replica droid.”

“He’s not,” said the lieutenant, still staring into her coffee. “Or if he is, he’s really good at faking. He...kind of doesn’t sound so great, if you haven’t noticed.”

“Is it just me or is that getting worse?” someone else asked. “It’s kind of awkward during briefings. I mean, it takes a lot longer to get our orders than it used to.”

“I don’t think it’s just you. He couldn’t talk at all when I gave him the message capsule thing, which -- it has to be from Snoke, right?”

There was an uncomfortable silence. All of them at the table had been read into _the plan_ , way back at the beginning -- all of them had had to face General Hux and Captain Phasma asking them a series of rapid-fire probing questions that left no opportunity to think up considered replies, and had been on some level relieved to be told that their own dim misgivings about the way things were being handled were shared at the highest levels of command. But the past months on the station had been focused entirely on the job they’d been sent to do, and it felt a little strange to be reminded of the reason they were _really_ doing the job; that what they were building was, or would be, part of a dangerously different future. 

“Maybe not,” said the officer whose friend in engineering had apparently been making such a thoughtful study of General Hux’s movements. “Maybe it’s something else. It could even be _good_ news, I mean, that’s _possible_ , right? Right?”

“Statistically speaking, I suppose.”

“He didn’t look like it was good news this morning,” said the lieutenant, and swallowed the last of her coffee with a wince. “He looked worse.”

“Hey. Cheer up, okay? It’ll be fine, he knows what he’s doing. This is _Hux_ , remember? He’s practically legendary. He knows everything. Remember that mess with the wrong reactor cradle parts back in the beginning? And the way he comes up beside you and -- like, tells you the answer to the damn crossword puzzle clue you can’t figure out, and just keeps walking?”

She smiled, finally. “He talked me through a total LOS, when we were just beginning to power up the antennas. Something glitched in one of the aiming circuits on one receiver dish and that feed went entirely to shit, just white noise, cosmic static. It was the first time I ever saw that outside of sims and I completely forgot how to take bearings and reorient a high-gain dish manually, I just...froze up, my mind went totally blank, it was awful.”

Her companions nodded: they’d all at one point or another experienced similar moments of _oh fuck what am I supposed to be doing I can’t REMEMBER_. “I didn’t even realize it was _him_ at first, just that someone was standing beside me and calmly talking me through the procedure, step by step -- not doing it for me, not taking over control, but just talking, and about three steps in it all kind of clicked in my head and I could remember the rest of it, like I’d never forgotten. But he stayed there until I’d gotten the thing more or less aimed in the right direction and could hand over the boresight control back to the computer for fine-tuning, and then I looked up and it was him, _he’d_ been helping me, like a sim-instructor or something. I didn’t know what to say, and he just kind of nodded at the console and told me to get computer infrastructure to check on that circuit and figure out what had caused the glitch, and walked off.”

“There, see?” said her colleague. “He knows everything. He’s got it all planned out. Whatever was in that message capsule, he’ll deal with it, even if he’s hacking up a lung. It’s _Hux_. He has this _under control._ ”


	2. Chapter 2

Anson Balardine had kept his world very much to itself since the fall of the Empire. The Balardines – Anson, his mother before him, his grandfather before her, and all the scions and offbranchings of their family, as numerous as the grains of rice they grew and just as well-distributed throughout the planetary government of Frey's Hope – were self-sufficient. They had never gone over to the New Republic (brash, Anson had thought, thirty years ago, brash and _skeletal,_ which was worse) and they had never been beholden to Supreme Leader Snoke, though of course they had paid their respects. Anson's own middle son had joined up with the Order, and then gotten himself blown to pieces in a TIE fighter; that was tithe paid, seven years worth and more.

Anson was _careful_ with his planet. They were not ambitious. They grew rice and they grew men and women, who grew more rice, and the grey-green terraced hills of Frey's Hope under their convivial yellow sun waxed and waned with the seasons. The galaxy could whirl on by as it would.

Yet, here in the spring of his sixty-eighth year, with planting already weeks underway, he had two interlocking problems that were not native to Frey's Hope and could not be solved by judicious rearrangement of his own genetic resources. One of those problems was the system right next door: Wolsje I through IV, a spangle of iron-rich industrial worldlets that glinted in the evening sky when Anson stood on the southern balcony of the governor's mansion, and had never been much else but attractive scenery and the occasional commercial treaty before this year.

This year, the trade in ore and refined fuel had dried right up; more lucrative contracts elsewhere, his eldest daughter had said at the yearly Balardine board meeting, but what she'd meant was: the Wolsje system had been suborned by the revolutionary arm of the New Republic, if the soi-disant Resistance could properly be called a revolution. Anson could have written Wolsje off, as Frey's Hope was not in enormous need of reactor fuel, but he could not so easily dismiss the problem of having the First Order's favorite enemies ever so close to his planet.

Everyone knew what had happened to the Hosnian system. If Anson had been a man more prone to neurasthenic fearfulness, he imagined he would be dreaming about all the rice fields of Frey's Hope going up in sunkilling fire, by virtue of merely being in the wrong part of the galaxy. He counted himself lucky that he only worried about the prospect of being caught in the crossfire of some new First Order superweapon, deployed indiscriminately, while he was _awake_.

His other problem was out in the gardens, getting her exquisite knees dirty planting ornamental lotuses in the pond alongside Anson's more excitable grandchildren: Juliana Tarkin, bearer of ill news and paranoiac fantasy. She'd been here three weeks, his wife's guest, a perfectly charming young woman despite the obvious ambition. They'd had many similar visitors before, out on galactic grand tours, looking for power and position and connections. Harmless. Except: Anson was sure that along with lotuses Juliana was busily planting her ever-so-convincing analysis of the _deterioration_ of the Supreme Leader, his _diminished capacity to evaluate the situation._ The clear and present danger of allowing such a man to remain in control of weapons like the one which had destroyed the Hosnians.

Anson would have liked it very much if people like Juliana – people with _agendas_ – did not also happen to be correct.

He'd been considering her solution for several days. _Join us,_ she'd said. _Our General understands what it means to want stability. It will be ugly, of course, but after the ugliness there will be the kind of prosperity I am too young to remember._ Anson knew what she really wanted: she wanted all the genetic wealth of Frey's Hope, men and women and the food they needed to eat. She wanted bodies to fill up her family's empty starships; fragile flesh and bone to toss into the maw of a war.

_Prosperity I am too young to remember_ was clever, though. She'd ferreted out what Anson valued most, unnervingly quick.

If not for Wolsje, he would have given her some money and sent her on her way. But there was a calculus of sacrifice, and some loss was survivable when held up next to the prospect of all loss.

Anson Balardine called for his secretary, and began composing a message to be sent to a distant communications array, halfway across the Outer Rim.

#

 

> _Ren:_
> 
> _I wonder if you know how strange and unexpectedly beautiful it is, to hear things like "you're like a resonant space, or a room with a vaulted roof"? I have never considered the world in terms of how other people’s minds might feel, never having had the ability to comprehend such a thing before. I still don’t, but I have the edges, I think; I know the way you feel, in my head, the way your presence manifests itself. _
> 
> _I miss it, and you, so much._
> 
> _You said before that you didn’t think the sensitization was permanent, and perhaps it isn’t, but it’s still present to some extent. The ring in my keeping is safe, do not be concerned about that, but it is perceptible to me even despite the shielding, when I am very near. I have not handled it much, but I find that I want to._
> 
> _I am curious about it. And about the nature of the balance. It calls to the other ring, I’m sure of it, but across these distances can your half possibly answer?_
> 
> _I can picture you on a desert planet, in all your black drapery. Not with ease, but I can, and there have been dreams, fragments of dream, drowning in sunlight. Tell me you’re all right, Ren. Wherever you are. I need to know that._
> 
> _The rumors of unrest out here are growing, based on the traffic we are already relaying at half nominal strength. I gather -- and this is merely my interpretation, you understand -- that some think Skywalker could be behind some of the skirmishes. Which is a particularly interesting theory, wouldn't you say?_
> 
> _Write back and tell me about the balance, because I think it’s important, and -- tell me about you. What you’re doing. _
> 
> _\-- H_

 

#

 

Kylo Ren remembered anticipating – without even the slightest frisson of dread – an audience with the Supreme Leader. Approaching Snoke's asteroid base with his heart beating rapid-time in the cage of his ribs, palms clammy inside his gloves, and thinking only _what will he teach me, what can I become_ \-- thinking _I will withstand every pain, I'll show him_ , the savage bright hunger of it, of being _willing_ , of being _ready_ , if only Snoke would tell him again how he was _of use_.

Not so long ago.

The physical sensations were much the same, now, despite the dread: speeding heart rate, faint nausea, a deep thankfulness for mask and regalia and all the rest of his carefully-assembled image that hid how he felt from everyone _but_ Snoke. Snoke, and Hux. The problem was – he couldn't think about Hux. Not now. Not for the next twelve hours, but especially not for the next two.

The last letter had come, folded tightly inside its capsule and delivered by a cook on a resupply vessel (Ren suspected she was not in fact a cook, but a trooper pretending to be one, and he felt a strange, vivid compassion for what she was willing to do, for him, for their General), just before Snoke's summons had reached him on the _Dark Heart_. It had seemed like somehow Hux had known, across weeks and infinite space, that he would need to hear from him just then. An impossible happenstance, but so comforting that Ren had held onto it – the very irrationality was wonderful, the idea that all the wide spaces of the universe were for once arrayed in their favor –

He hadn't had time to reply, to answer how he wanted to answer: to explain the fragments of what he had put together about _balance_ , to find a way of expressing the vast spinning weight of the galaxy, how he thought that he and Hux might be the only stable points in it. How _little_ it was turning out that he really knew.

The came to an easy landing in the hangar bay. He had to _stop thinking about Hux_ , he had to excise every inch of longing, seal off and cauterize all the parts of his mind which were continuously occupied with imagining what it would be like if Hux were here with him. All of that had to be silenced. If he kept nothing else from Snoke he would keep this.

At least he had an entire box of scavenged Jedi artifacts to appease Snoke with, including the setting to the Eye of Khi. It might be enough.

Ren stalked through the asteroid's carved-out corridors. Soldiers and functionaries scattered in front of him, which was still very satisfying, even if it also meant that he approached the great central door of the audience chamber rather faster than he'd liked. He could feel the weight of Snoke's mind, behind it, like a spider at the bottom of a trap. A _poised_ gravity.

The doors irised open for him. There was the nagging, horrid pressure to go to his knees; to crawl down the causeway to where Snoke waited, enthroned. It was one of his oldest tricks. Ren had figured it out when he was sixteen. The point was – the point was that you wanted to crawl, and you had to figure out how not to want to.

"Supreme Leader," he said, walking -- _walking_ down that causeway. He took off the mask. Snoke liked it better when he could _look_ at him. "I have brought you the artifacts you asked me for."

"You took your time," said Snoke. There were expressions on the burnt field of his face. Ren had learned to read them, to catch the smallest nuance of the turn of that twisted mouth, the narrowing of the lidless eyes, that heralded the beginning of displeasure. They were there now. His stomach roiled, all despite himself.

"There were a great many planets on your list, Supreme Leader," he said. It wasn't (there wasn't) a defense. It was a strategy. A – delaying tactic. Long enough to take a breath, and brace.

"Show me."

Pressure like a wave. This part they did without talking. Ren thought of ( _falling open in the bright space between minds – no, not that_ ) a soldier skinning out of his trooper whites, practiced, revelatory, a display of the bones and muscles. Snoke looked at the collection of his memory like he might evaluate the physical development of a man in training –

It hurt every time. It hurt the same way every time, which was the worst part. It was like being unpeeled, layer by layer, looked at, eyes _everywhere_ , eyes on all sides, thin slices of memory held up like transparent slices of fish, laid out on Snoke's tongue for consumption. Oilslick unstitching.

Snoke was wearing the Eye of Khi around his neck, a clouded-blue jewel that glinted, shimmered – Ren thought of the surface of the once-lake on Ysil, the ripples in it like a heatstruck mirage. It was safe to think of that. (He didn't want to think of it, ever again. It was safe to think of _because_ he didn't want to think of it.) Snoke – battened to it, a dry flicker of _perhaps there is some interest to you after all._

Once, he would have wept. Relief, or shame. The two irrevocably wound up together. He wanted to weep now.

_You are beginning to see,_ said Snoke, soundless, inside his skull. _Perhaps exposing you to resonant objects is something we ought to have tried earlier._

_What is it that I am seeing?_ Ren asked him. He would have asked the same way a decade ago, new, desperate for Snoke to unlock the potential he'd promised Ren was there. He – still wanted to be told. He still wanted to be _right_. He wasn't even _lying –_

(he needed to not be lying)

Snoke's mind inside his mind, the scalpel friction of it. The casual hunger. It hurt. The edges of his vision were going to sparkles, to the flat cut-out blankness that happened after the sparkles.

(smokescreen: the salt-flats, the sky burnt inside-out white)

_In the fullness of time you will understand,_ Snoke said. _Show me the setting for the Eye._

Ren reached into the case he'd brought. The setting, still encrusted in salt, burned his fingertips as he held it out. When Snoke took it there was a sharp flash from the Eye of Khi, a tremble in the light side that was like a surge of nausea, a resonant frequency vibrating higher. 

He didn't know, did he. Snoke knew – less. Less than Ren did, about what was happening to him. There was an awful misery to that. He couldn't think about it. Not with Snoke asking questions, over and over, _how did it feel_ , and _what did you see_ , and _again. From the beginning, Ren. Slower. There are inconsistencies._

It took so long. 

Afterward, dizzy, sick with pain, he staggered back to the _Dark Heart_ remembering the last time, remembering Phasma finding him and bringing him to Hux's quarters – 

\-- went there himself, finding his way by memory in the red-black temporary blindness. Every footfall was like a ringing bell of pain. Of course the rooms were empty, and that was. That was. He lay down on the narrow bed. Crying hurt and he was doing it anyway, each hot tear like a score of acid, dripping across the bridge of his nose. 

(He thought he might have managed it. They might still be secret. Snoke might have been happy enough with the visions and the artifacts and the endless replay of Ysil, to have _not noticed_. But he wasn't sure. And there was no way of knowing. And he'd never, ever had anyone who could tell him _why_ \-- why the Force responded how it did, merciless and huge – it turned out he'd never had that at all.) 

 

#

 

General Hux sat at the desk in his quarters, tapping an empty slipdrive against the polished desktop, turning it over and over in his fingers as he stared at something beyond the computer display console, or the industrial precast plascrete of the wall. A long way beyond.

He was thinking. The transmission from Frey’s Hope had come in an hour or so ago, coded with a series of layers of encryption that told Hux it was a) not regular First Order business and b) therefore most likely something to do with the Tarkin contingent, and he’d watched it three times in a row, here in the privacy of his quarters, and would be pacing if this were not an unpleasantly exhausting prospect. As it was he tapped the slipdrive on the desk, walking it absently across the knuckles of his hand and back again like a man doing a conjuring trick, and _thought_. 

Anson Balardine’s planet was unremarkable except in its perennial, consistent fecundity, no different from a hundred other agricultural worlds across the galaxy -- apart from the fact that no other small sturdy agrarian planets’ governors had made the decision to throw their lot in with his as-yet-amorphous hostile takeover bid. The vote of support, even if it had come at the urging of a Tarkin, meant rather a lot to Hux, although he tried not to recognize this. 

Balardine had offered manpower, and supplies to feed them. The numbers he sketched out in his message were rather more hopeful than Hux had anticipated, but the real problem was not simply a matter of locating warm bodies: Balardine’s people were untrained, untried, had no solid military experience, and therefore no leadership or command structure could hope to make use of them without additional external aid. 

Hux walked the empty slipdrive back across his knuckles, winking and gleaming in the dim light. 

He supposed that on some level he had wanted to avoid considering this next particular step -- perhaps because he might not actually, until now, have believed that it was possible to get this far -- but here it was, as plain as day, as plain as its own inevitability. 

He got up, leaving the drive on the desktop, and went over to stare at himself in the tiny refresher’s mirror: pale, hollow-eyed, but reasonably squared away. Hux relocated a few strands of hair, straightened his uniform tunic, and returned to his desk; plugged the slipdrive into the computer console’s holoproj recording slot; and tapped a control. Blue light caught and flooded him, scanning vertically too fast to follow with the eye. 

Hux took a careful breath, folded his hands on the desk, looking into the recorder’s eye, and began to speak. 

~

Three days later: the city of Ira on the planet Katyr, in the violet twilight after its second sunset. The air felt heavy, thick and sweet as syrup, perfumed with soft-petaled flowers, rich with rare woods, warm with amber. From the private chambers of Eres Khataj, high atop her personal spire -- almost as high as any viewpoint in the city -- the last of the dying day lit the curved horizon with a lick of scarlet that reflected Khataj’s red eyes, blank pupilless cabochons glowing faintly with their own light. 

The transparent bluish ghost of General Hux from the elbows up, about six inches high, hovered over the desk, frozen in mid-word. Khataj tapped a control with a long-nailed finger, and he vanished as if he had never been. 

Khataj leaned back in her formchair and regarded Captain Phasma through her eyelashes. Phasma had left off the chromed armor for this particular assignment, wearing dark form-fitting garments that nevertheless did nothing to disguise her military bearing. Khataj’s own clothing was not so very dissimilar, but cut and wrought with subtler artistry, and in the long fall of her blue-black braided hair crystals glinted and gleamed as she moved -- as she breathed -- catching the last of the red-violet light in a thousand glowing ember-points. 

“An interesting proposition,” she said. 

Phasma kept her face as expressionless as ever, glad that the Chiss weren’t mind-readers, or at least that nobody had ever _suggested_ they were. It had been a long and anxious trip out here -- on the station’s fastest shuttle, stripped of its ID and given a false one that would hopefully fool most casual inquiries, dispatched under the cover of an official transmission stating that it was under repair -- and Phasma hadn’t _liked_ leaving Hux alone, not now, but she hadn’t had a choice. She made herself ease slightly out of the rigid stance, still not quite meeting Khataj’s red eyes. 

Eres Khataj was officially in the import-export business, which covered such a _lot_ of ground. In point of fact she ran the Nova crime syndicate with more efficiency than either of the two previous holders of that particular position, having fought her way into rather than inheriting the job. Nova was not an operation on the scale of, say, Black Sun, but it was younger and less fractured into factions -- the fall of the Empire had sent long-ranging cracks throughout the galactic underworld, even after Xizor’s death -- and Khataj had something of a reputation for sensible decision-making. Which was why Hux had decided to extend this particular offer, or request, or combination of the two, to Khataj rather than her immediate competitors.

Khataj looked at Phasma lazily for a moment longer, and then sat up, as if making a decision. “I like your General’s style,” she said, the crystals in her braids chiming and glittering as they swung. “But more importantly I like what he offers. I think we can do business, although not _quite_ on the scale he requests here. Mercenaries, and ship-commanders, and weaponry.”

Hux’s proposition had been simple: he had the manpower, but needed officers to lead them, and not just any officers, either. Nova commanded a wealth of experienced, effective, and notoriously vicious mercenary forces, and Hux held no compunctions about negotiating with the underworld. In his view, there would always _be_ an underworld; the wise strategist chose to acknowledge that fact, and turn it to his advantage.

“Relax, Captain,” Khataj said, smiling. “No doubt you have had rather a trying journey.”

Phasma tried not to let her relief show. “Thank you, Lord Khataj,” she said. “My General and I appreciate your consideration. I should be getting back --”

“Nonsense,” said Khataj. “No ships will be leaving for hours yet, there’s a moonstorm predicted; and the hospitality traditions of this planet would not countenance your departure without at least some refreshment.”

_Damn it_ , Phasma thought, trying not to notice a number of things, including the crystals in Khataj’s hair and her own grinding, aching fatigue. “Perhaps just…”

“Come with me,” said Khataj, getting to her feet in a glitter of light and disconnecting the slipdrive from her desk’s projector; it disappeared somewhere in her sleeve or the folds of her over-robe. “I will compose a reply for you to take back with you. But refreshment, first.”

~

Hux had read accounts of mountain-climbers -- men and women pushed beyond their limits, grimly hanging on to nothing but ambition and determination and the will to survive -- climbing to what they thought was the summit of some final and unforgiving peak and being entirely undone by the realization that what they had been aiming for was merely an illusion, a shoulder of the mountain, still thousands and thousands of feet below the actual summit. 

He could understand, now, sitting alone in his quarters, a little of that terrible, drowning realization that there was still _so far to go_. He had thought he understood loneliness, and now, without Ren and without Phasma, no way of knowing if either of them were safe or even still _alive_ \-- now, oh, gods, now he was discovering just how much worse it could actually get.

He hadn’t taken Phasma into his confidence about a lot of things, for his sake as well as her own, but just simply knowing she was _there_ had been a comfort he’d been unaware of until it was withdrawn. And now, alone, _truly_ alone, out of all contact and left to carry on by himself, now he thought: _I don’t know if I can do this._

It was a little while before another thought rose to burst that one’s unpleasant bubble: _but I have to do it anyway; and one can always do what one must._

Hux sat listening to the rasp and rustle of his own breathing in his chest, for a long time, before getting off the bed and sitting down on the floor, drawing his music-box over from its place beneath the desk, opening the various locks and codes, and tilting back the lid to reveal the nondescript wrapped-up form of the gold crown nestling among his own old possessions. It called to him like -- like a magnet’s pull, but there was something in it of the terrible fascination of a precipice’s edge, of the compelling call of some great boundless depth; and Hux reached into the box with a gloved hand and touched the hard curve of the crown through its wrappings, and shivered all over as if a cold night wind were blowing through his bones.

 

#

 

There were two kinds of terrible bars, Ren was discovering: both kinds could get you very drunk, but in the first sort you could separate unsavory persons from their money in exchange for shiny artifacts with dubiously-constructed pedigrees, and in the second sort you were the unsavory type whose money abruptly became separable from your person.

He was really hoping this bar was the first kind.

Going back to Derya V and Nadja Beq to turn his scavenged artifacts into operating funds was out of the question; after his audience with Snoke he'd received a new, shorter list of planets to visit, and none of them were close enough to Derya V to make a side-trip feasible while maintaining whatever was left of his cover. (He still didn't know. It gnawed at him, not being sure. What sort of subtle _was_ Snoke? The kind that would slip into his mind and steal out insurrection and longing on a fishhook of thought, and then _not let him know that he knew?_ Make him – wait? Until he thought he was safe, until he was back with Hux and then – some unimaginable betrayal at the last?)

Either way, he couldn't return to Derya V. So he'd taken the _Dark Heart_ out to a sector which had little love for the Order – and hopefully even _less_ love for the multiply-revivified corpse of the Republic – and went looking for terrible bars with worse people in them.

He'd done it _properly_. He hadn't gone out of the ship as Kylo Ren at all.

There were some aspects of his appearance which he was stuck with, barring a substantial investment in surgical alteration: the nose wasn't going anywhere, and the scar that curved down from eyebrow to cheek was a thick white-pink permanence. He assumed he could have cut his hair – had thought about it, staring into the mirror in the fresher on the _Dark Heart_ , imagining walking around in public _unmasked_ \-- but Hux liked his hair, for whatever inexplicable reasons Hux had, and therefore – no. Not that.

Instead he'd sent troopers out to buy a set of clothes suitable for an amateur archeologist, the sort of person with more ambition than sense, who would think that drifting around the part of the galaxy where most people were involved in at least one illegal activity, and usually several, was a good time: bone-white trousers and tunic, and an elaborate embroidered coat in blue and turquoise and silver. Ren thought the ensemble made him look about eighteen, which was unfortunate at best, but he looked nothing like _Kylo Ren_.

And nothing like Ben Solo, either, which was – if he had to hang around with smugglers, he had better things to remind them of than a set of people who were _dead_. Both father and son.

He had a drink he wasn't drinking – deep orange, some distilled local specialty (he'd drunk the first one, and he could still feel the rich chemical burn down the back of his throat, the barest fuzzing of the edges of the world) – and a table full of disreputable companions, some of whom might want to turn a profit. He had been talking up the mystic powers of his artifacts for a good half hour, ever since he'd bet the smallest of them in a game of counters, lost it deliberately, let the Twi'lek who'd picked it up think about just _how many more_ he might have. He'd nearly sealed the arrangement – handshake-sealed, anyway, nothing so formal out here as a contract, and didn't he just wish he had his lightsaber with him, he felt naked without it, worse than being unmasked – when the conversation had turned to where that Twi'lek was getting all the money she wanted to trade for artifacts.

"You signed up with Nova on that fool's errand, Izorbasha?" asked one of the few other humans in this bar, a heavyset person in layers of grey leather.

Izorbasha rearranged the position of her lekku, a Twi'lek sort of shrug. "They pay."

"Like you'll have _time_ to turn a profit on archeology, if you're going out there to take on the Order."

Ren – _paid attention_ , and tried to not look like he was paying attention.

"Oh, it's a half year's campaign at _most_ ," Izorbasha went on. "Nothing'll come of it, but Nova pays out, and I can keep my own skin knitted up, no matter how many soldiers someone feels like tossing into the Order's threshing machine under my command."

"Someone's taking on the First Order?" Ren asked, despite himself. He tried to sound _credulous_ , at least. Wide-eyed.

The person in grey grinned at him, with perfect white teeth filed to points. "You thinking of giving up archaeology in favor of soldiering, kid? More money in it."

"I like what I do," Ren said, trying to feel nothing in particular, to emit an attitude of vague offense – and to reach right into the top of this person's mind and skim off whatever he was thinking about.

Hardly anyone in the galaxy knew how to shield. They were thinking _mercenaries,_ clear as daybreak. The Nova syndicate, under Khataj. Ren had somehow – never imagined Hux would hire them. It wasn't _like_ him. Mercenaries were the least orderly, the least controllable sort of soldiers; even Ren knew that, and it had never been his business to keep track of what sort of persons made good soldiers in the first place. How desperate _were_ they, that Hux needed to do this? He tried to imagine him coming to that decision, out on the edge of the Rim, alone, and could only summon up pale ghosts, Hux-fantasies who smiled at him and said nothing about lack of manpower.

"Who’s behind it?" he asked. He should try to trace the intelligence back, even if he couldn't tell Hux about it himself.

"Whoever hired the Tarkin fleet out of retirement," Izorbasha said.

"Old lady Tarkin," opined the last of their tablemates, a woman who was either actually a droid or someone who was more mechanical than flesh at this point in her life.

"Nah," said the person in grey. "She's never done anything but roost in Eriadu. It's a _secret_. Some disgruntled general who no one will name. Probably a cypher."

"A cypher, or Skywalker," said Izorbasha.

"What," Ren said, feeling the universe spin around him, enormous, perilous, perhaps _intent_ , "is a Skywalker?"

Izorbasha smiled. "Kid, let me tell you a story, since you're so into old temple archaeology…"

~

Afterward, his head singing with alcohol and too many fractured partial-reflections of stories he'd – grown up on, in some other life, told backward and inside-out in the mouths of strangers – Ren sat at the cramped desk in the tiny room he'd rented to sleep in, and tried to find the right words to write to Hux. The sodium-vapor lamps in the street outside flooded the window with sick orange light, and that street was full of voices – shouting, running feet. Glass breaking.

He wanted to spill everything. Suspected if Hux were actually _here_ he would have, just dissolve into a litany of miserable recounting, but with his hand closed tight around the stylus he couldn't bring himself to inflict that across parsecs, to use this single precious letter to complain.

This planet had five moons. It would never get dark enough to sleep. He could write drafts until he was satisfied.

 

#

 

> _Hux –_
> 
> _Before anything else: I miss you terribly, and I promise I'm all right. The desert was weeks ago, and it has not followed me very far, or at least I hope it hasn't, though sometimes I shut my eyes and see that sky, the way the blue of it had gone to white. I hope you don't dream of that, for all that the idea of your dreaming anything I've seen is strangely appealing._
> 
> _I don't think the rings, as you say, can reach as far apart as you and I have traveled, but I am sure they try. The dark one is a vibration that calls out. I carry it with me, even onto planets like the one I'm writing you from, where I have no business carrying anything like it. I am not even dressed as me. You would, I think, laugh: I was wearing white. It seemed apposite. I needed to persuade some people that I was no one of any significance at all._
> 
> _They are all talking of Skywalker, out here. Of Skywalker, and of a great mercenary fleet being hired by a mysterious general. Someone claimed it was Grand Admiral Thrawn, back from the dead, or perhaps a clone of him, but the idea was roundly dismissed. It is – strange, out this far. None of the people are like any of the people I've known._
> 
> _I would tell you about balance if I understood it. I don't. I don't understand it at all – I am beginning to think no one does, no one has, not for thousands of years. Part of it is a kind of seeing. Seeing everything at the same time. The whole of the Force, light and dark, both sides of the waveform, extended out forever. But I had always been told that it was going to be an increase in power, and I don't know what that will mean, if it happens at all._
> 
> _I don't know – too much._
> 
> _Don't touch the bright ring. I am not sure what it would do, as far away from its other half as it is, if you put your bare hands on it._
> 
> _And I would not have you come to harm._
> 
>  
> 
> _\- R_

 

#

 

> _Ren --_
> 
> _There is something very terrible about...not just the fact of distance and separation, but the fact of time passing between the moment you write these words and the moment I can touch and read them. I--_

Flimsiplast sounds like the scrim of ice at the edge of a lake, crackling and squealing, as it un-crumples.

>   
>  _Ren --_
> 
> _I am glad you are not under that particular sky, if it is the one I have dreamed about, because I think if I had to see that white-blue poisoned glare for very long I might go mad, and --_

>   
>  _Ren --_
> 
> _I am not good at this, or even remotely competent at it, and I find I resent the handicap of my own incompetence. This is my failing, and I apologize for it._
> 
> _The things I dream are not of significance. I don’t know how salt can be...bitter on the tongue, it makes no sense. Or how a sky can be both blue and white, and so bright and hot that it is like a blow, as if light can have weight._
> 
> _I can see you in white, very easily. It would be difficult to look at for very long, like that sunlight on a metal surface, but perhaps I am more susceptible than other people: I am...as you told me...sensitized._
> 
> _I have already touched the ring: it is merely warm, and much too heavy for its size, as if it were made of one of the denser elements. Nothing untoward has happened. It is fanciful to say it wants me to put it on._
> 
> _We have heard rumors of Skywalker here, as well; and transmissions from the far side of the Rim seem to indicate that there is truth to such rumors. I had not heard about the talk of a resurrected Thrawn, however. I --_
> 
> _\-- I have spent months, now, cursing myself for not thinking to ask you for something of yours, to keep with me on this wretched assignment. Your letters are the closest thing I have, and I keep those safe and very close indeed, but they are...not the same. I should have asked for -- you will laugh at me -- a lock of your hair. Something I could touch, and hold in my hands, and reassure myself that you are still real, and you are still...that you still want this. Whatever it is._
> 
> _It is frustrating for me at a remove, not to understand even the edges of the balance, and I can only imagine how infuriating it must be for you, who already know more than I could ever comprehend. If Snoke does not know, which I am assuming he doesn’t, or he might have told you, then there may not be anyone living who can explain it. But...perhaps it’s you, who will come to that understanding. _
> 
> _Send me something that I can hold, Ren. I need it. I need...that._
> 
> _\--H_

 

The crumpled, wasted evidence of his own inefficiency burns quite brightly, and fast: in seconds there is nothing more than fine ash and a harsh, acrid stink that catches in his chest and sets him coughing, raw and painful and weary. He barely notices, sealing the folded letter into a message-capsule and then dropping his hand to the music-box tucked underneath the desk: it is warm to his fingertips, heated by the activity of the thing inside. 

The thing that Ren had warned him, too late, _much_ too late, not to touch.

 

#

 

The station’s traffic was steadily increasing as the arrays neared completion. They were at about 75% signal strength on the short-range and 60% on the medium- and long-range antenna clusters, and almost all of the metal latticework of the station’s polar masts was covered with bristling white dishes of varying size.

Hux’s people -- his _loyal_ people, his handpicked conspirators -- were taking up the load with the smooth professional efficiency he expected of them. As time went by and the traffic passing through the station settled into a kind of predictable pattern, he had them report to him not only any major First Order intelligence but also transmissions from the far side of the Rim. Particularly the signal parameters: frequency, noise ratio, type of encryption cipher, and any ID codes indicating the type of comm equipment that had generated the transmission. 

He had to get this right. The more detail he could add, the better. When Hux was satisfied that he knew exactly what a transmission from an old SJFS Type VII hyperwave communications system, on the other side of the Outer Rim, attenuated by distance and cosmic-ray interference, both _looked_ and _sounded_ like, he began to work out what it needed to say. 

What he eventually came up with was...convincing. Even to himself, it was convincing. 

He had one of his officers actually record the message, on the off-chance that his own voiceprint identification might make it through the noise generation and modulation they would apply. It wasn’t long, but it got the point across, and the point was _Skywalker_. That it was _Skywalker_ returned, with an army, a _growing_ army, attacking First Order outposts, that Skywalker had declared the First Order was to pay for the deaths of the Hosnian worlds. That Snoke’s paranoia had not been ill-founded, after all. 

Hux stood in the station’s command center, in the small hours of on-station night. The lights were half down, and the only officers present were his most trusted people. The slipdrive with their recorded message was plugged into the central signal-processing computer console. On the screens, scrolling streams of data kept track of the signals being received by the station, from reception through amplification to transmission. 

For the past half an hour he had had them intermittently dropping out power to the antenna responsible for receiving on the frequency Hux had decided to use: the repeated, inconsistent pattern of failure exactly mimicked a faulty control circuit. Anyone paying attention wouldn’t be particularly concerned, nor register it as significant when one of the dropouts lasted longer than the others. 

He watched the data spool past on the screens, sucking on a cough drop. At times like this, preparing to take a significant tactical step, Hux had always felt as if everything slowed down as the moment approached: slowed down, and went cold and clear and bright. He couldn’t take a deep breath, but he felt that slowing all around him nonetheless, and when something in his head went _click_ he said “Now.” 

The officer at the central console typed in a rapid series of commands. At once, a number of things happened: power to the receiving antenna’s processor control circuit was cut, preventing any signals from being received on that frequency; the datastream registered another dropout; and the input from the dead antenna was bypassed by the input from the auxiliary circuit into which the slipdrive had been plugged. On the screens the blank 00000 parameters from the dead antenna smoothly turned back into moving, shifting columns of numbers as Hux’s message was relayed to the transmitting array and sent out into space. 

Without Hux having to give the order, the lieutenant at the console -- by chance, the same one who had found him by the viewport, weeks ago -- routed the outgoing signal through an audio processor, so they could all hear what was being transmitted: a man’s voice, weary, washed through with waves of static and the high singing whine of interference, reporting an attack from forces led by _Luke Skywalker_ , repeat _Skywalker_ , requesting that Supreme Leader Snoke be informed at once. The voice cut off abruptly at the end of the transmission, as if something might have _happened_ \-- either to the distant speaker, or to the comm console he was using. 

A moment passed, and then another, and Hux said “Now” again -- and the signal bypass was released, power to the receiving antenna restored, and nobody who happened to be listening to what the station _transmitted_ would have the slightest reason to imagine that the message they had just heard had _not_ come from halfway across the galaxy but from the bounce rig itself.

 

#

 

"You Ren?"

The voice came out of the alleyway in the gathering twilight half-dark, neon reflections pooling on the rough rainslick concrete, and Ren turned, saw: a man, holding a message-capsule. His heart felt like a fragmentation grenade, a sudden explosion of _want_.

"Yes," he said. To all of the hells with his cover, if he could have that capsule.

"Good," said the man, "I heard you got credits," and then he tried to shoot Ren with a blaster.

Ren caught the first bolt in the shoulder, a graze that burned; caught the second bolt with the Force, and sent it back to hover just in front of his assailant's forehead. It was _easy._ Pain sang through him, a bright and brittle sunrise, and the Force responded to him like his lightsaber would – something known, something powerful and familiar and _his_. He stalked forward. This blue coat was not half as good as his black drapery for intimidation, but that didn't matter.

"Where did you get this?" he asked, quite calm.

" _Please don't kill me--_

"I asked you a question."

"Off a First Order trooper, _please_ \--"

"And where is this trooper now?"

He didn't wait for the man to answer. He could see it on the surface of the narrow little space that was his mind: the trooper's neck broken, the spot of blood at the corner of his mouth. Younger than Ren. Younger than most of the people who served for them.

He let the blaster bolt free of its Force-constraints. It went right through the man's skull, cleanly. He was careful of the brain matter when he knelt to pick up his message-capsule. Opened it right there, in the alley, with the stink of charred brains and bone rising up around him.

Opened it, read it, and thought he might actually throw up. Hux was – what he'd _done_ to him – he had never meant – the sensitization wasn't supposed to _hurt_ him.

Ren imagined himself a contagion, all the while he walked back to the Dark Heart, and was not at all sure he was wrong. Hadn't he always been? Hadn't he been a thing that warped the clean edges of the Force since the very beginning?

 

>   
>  _Hux –_
> 
> _I should have left you with something. A lock of hair, if you'd like. A favor, like the people in your operas give one another. A ribbon or a medal or – I should have thought of it, I didn't think of it, I'm not any good at this._
> 
> _I'm real, I promise you that much, and I think of hardly anything but you, so of course you should not worry that I could for an instant stop wanting – this. You. Even if I fear that I've somehow hurt you, changed you, you should not dream of that desert, you should not have to, you weren't there._
> 
> _I can't write more, now. I have to send this, and I have to get off this planet. A man tried very hard to murder me this evening, and I suspect he has friends._
> 
> _I have to believe that we will see each other again, soon, and that you won't – regret this._
> 
> _There's a lock of my hair in with this flimsiplast now and I can only hope it reaches you safely._
> 
> _\- R_

 

#

 

On his desk the dark curl of hair lay like a small dead animal: something silky-soft, vulnerable, _over_.

Hux read the letter twice, and then a third time, and tried to work out how long ago it had been written, and if it had made it off whatever godsforsaken planet Ren had been visiting _before_ or _after_ Ren himself, and if the man who had _tried very hard_ to murder Ren had, in fact, had friends. 

Part of his mind pointed out that Ren was entirely capable of defending himself against a great deal of danger, but most of it was caught, snagged like fine-weave krinnsilk on the thorn of that particular phrase, warping and drawing his thought process out of its orderly pattern. _Tried very hard to murder me_.

Hux wondered if he would...know, if Ren died. If he would feel it, somehow, when that self that had sensitized him, magnetized him to the Force, stopped existing entirely; if he would lose that sense again altogether, no longer be able to detect things like the banked glow of the gold crown in its shielded box, be blind and deaf and dumb to that part of reality he had only scratched the very surface of acknowledging. 

He folded up the letter with numb fingers, and picked up the lock of Ren’s hair; held it to his face; breathed in the familiar scent -- and _need_ hit him like a blow, doubling him over. He had thought it was bad before, but this was worse than the music, worse than anything, the crushing force of Ren’s absence like a shockwave under water.

His fist closed around Ren’s hair. Clumsily, with no grace, Hux unfastened his tunic and tucked it and the letter safely inside; and then his hand returned as it had been doing so very often lately to the locked music-box, and this time he opened the locks and reached inside -- and took out the thing it held. 

The gold crown was not warm but _hot_ , fever-hot, and even through the black wrappings it made his fingers buzz and tingle with the energy it was putting out. The wrappings didn’t _help_ , because they too were Ren’s, and he could remember Ren talking about this thing back on the _Dark Heart_ , months past, a lifetime ago. 

Hux let the wrappings fall and held the thing in his two hands, feeling the thud of shock as some unthinkable circuit closed. His heart hiccupped and juddered and smoothed out again, and he closed his eyes, still able to see the crown with something that was not a physical sense at all, and listened to the sibilance inside his head. As soon as he began to listen, the pain in his chest drew away, faded out beyond his awareness of the crown’s voice. _Put me on,_ it said. _Put me on, and I will show you what you most desire to see._

_Ren_ , he thought. 

_Put me on and I will show him to you. I will show you everything._

Hux’s hands closed tighter around the bright gold, hard enough to hurt, and the pain somehow steadied him, brought back a little awareness of the real world outside the crown’s sphere of influence. _Don’t touch it_ , Ren had said, and perhaps he had had a point, but Hux didn’t know if he was still _alive_ , and perhaps knowing was worth whatever might come if he did set the thing on his head and let it do what it wanted with him. _It will eat me_ , he thought, somewhere a long way away. _It will eat me, and I will not mind._

_I have a duty_. It was his other-voice, the Brendol Hux voice, the one that came out when there was lecturing to do, and this time Hux was glad of it, of its familiarity. _I have a duty, and the people on this station rely on me, and if I am...consumed, by this thing, it is I who must answer for what will happen to them afterward._

Slowly, very, very slowly, he made his hands uncurl from the crown, the shrill pain of a fresh burn marking a line across both palms, and just as slowly made himself wrap the black gauze around it once again, hiding its light. When that was gone, when it was an anonymous shrouded circle, he found he could thrust it back into the box and slam the lid quickly before it spoke again inside his head; and he sat shaking for a long, long time afterward, staring sightless into the darkness of his quarters, before summoning up the strength to rise.

 

#

 

The dark crown sang sometimes in the night, a vibration too low to hear that ached inside Ren's bones like a fever. Six feet away from him, wrapped in gauze, sitting on his desk in his room on the _Dark Heart_ , hurtling with him through the hyperspace streaks of stars, and Ren could not sleep, not with the groaning of it. On bad nights – they were all bad nights, now – he got out of bed, caught the thing up in his hands, and lay down with it splayed across his chest where Hux should have been, held it until it quieted like a petulant child.

Slipped, in the dark, between waking and sleeping: slipped, too, somewhere between one star-streak and another –

Opens his eyes to see Hux. Daylight-clear, somewhere Ren has never been: a station, abuzz with activity, voices massed in eager conversation, and here – his lungs will fail him, he will shatter apart with relief and delight – here, enthroned on a straight-backed chair as tall as a sky-piercing spear, all the light of every star hung in the bright red flame of his hair, a ring of palest gold, is Hux, at last, at last –

He calls out to him. He says his name.

Hux turns his head, a slow motion, liquid slide, inhuman stillness. The starlight drips across him, blazes, so bright, the roof of this room is a vault and the vault is open to the wheeling spray of the galaxy. The set of Hux's shoulders is – not. Is not how he holds himself. (Does Ren remember? Has he been away so long as to have forgotten such simple things --)

Hux's eyes are blank chips the color of the salt flats on Ysil, blue burnt past ash to white-blind glow. Holes in the world. There is nothing behind them but light. Nothing at all but the expanding annihilating light of a supernova, clean and pure and empty.

_Hello_ , the thing wearing Hux says. _Hello, Kylo Ren._

It talks. It breathes. It lives, in a sense. Ren makes a sound, a torn-out sob of a noise.

The thing on the throne folds Hux's hands in its lap, narrow fingers twined up, and turns away, that same liquid motion, uncaring. There is nothing to it but a perfected order. The cold light after the death of stars, that expands and expands and expands –

Across its brow is the bright crown, Ren knows this now. Sees it now. Sees it very well –

(opened his eyes to the dark, the other crown clutched naked in his fists, gasped air, _slipped_ )

It walks the corridors of the station like Hux would, an endless ceaseless round. Some men call it _emperor_ and kneel when it passes, in hope and horror that it might touch them with a burning hand and render unto them a fraction of its power: thumbprints of white fire embossed on their foreheads that slowly dissolve the bone and brain beneath, but grant farsight, wisdom, unfeeling serenity while they last.

Hux is not _there_ to know –

(hyperspace screamed, all resonant frequency, Force-strings catching at the edges of Ren's mind, and he was not sure at all what was _real_ , if anything was, surely nothing was, surely it would be better if nothing was real at all)

What it touches will dissolve, eventually. Burnt, used up, poisoned. Looking into its eyes is like looking into the heart of a neutron star, a universe-warping weight.

Ren, on his knees: his head tilted into its blazing hand. How it settles in his hair with an unremembered heaviness. He looks up. There is _no recognition at all_ in its face, as it bends Hux's mouth to his forehead and everything goes _white-hot_ , arc flash –

\-- the _Dark Heart_ fell out of hyperspace with a bone-rattling jolt, something awry with the motivator, and Ren found himself in the middle of a sob, as if he had been weeping already for hours. The dark crown glowed in his hands, unwrapped, draining all the light from the room. His fingers were knotted so tight around it, it took him long moments to unpeel them, and when he did, all the blisters that had risen along their insides burst at once, weeping fluid like tears.

 

#

 

> _Ren --_
> 
> _Thank you, for the hair. It is...very definitely the most precious thing I own, that I have ever owned, and...I am writing this not knowing if you are...safe, if you as well as your letter got off that planet, but I have to hope because without that hope there is --_
> 
> _I’m so bad at this. My --_
> 
> _I’m not starting again because I’m almost out of flimsiplast and burning the ruined attempts hurts my chest so you will have to forgive me, for a lot of things, for everything, because I have been so very blind for so long that I’m angry with myself about it: but what you said, in your letter, about the favors. The people in my operas, and the...gifts they would exchange. You were right, you were so bloody right, and I have spent so long hearing the words without listening to them, without paying attention that it came as such a surprise to realize that all those songs, all those arias, every stupid plot that you’ve complained about, every illogical action, I understand them now. I would...do half those things, because --_
> 
> _I love you. That’s...the heart of it. The center. I did not know this could happen. I had no idea it could happen. But there’s no doubt, no question at all, I would be a poor tactician indeed if I were unable to assess and identify a situation as obvious and unquestionable as this one: I love you, Kylo Ren, and I will...not stop, until I stop, until there is nothing left of me. _
> 
> _The songs are about us. They always have been: I simply could not...see it, until now._
> 
> _I’ve said it and now I am closing this capsule before I can change my mind and burn this anyway._
> 
> _\-- H_

 

#

 

Hux had been expecting something like this summons for a while now. He had sent Snoke regular reports, as scheduled, and received a confirmation code from HQ to let him know the transmissions had been successful; but there had been no face-to-face holoproj conversation.

Expecting a thing did not make it any more pleasant. When he received the summons he was in the command center, and had to hurry back to his own quarters, and hurrying made him breathless almost at once; by the time he got there and locked the door behind him he was trying very hard not to wheeze. 

He tapped the control on his console, and Snoke's face sprang into existence, made of blue light, hovering over his desk. "Supreme Leader," he said, and saluted. 

"General," said Snoke, clipped, evaluative: as if he was weighing the word and its appropriateness on his tongue. "You seem to have made adequate progress with the communications array. Such interesting transmissions have come through it."

Hux managed not to cough, with an effort. "Progress has been steady, Supreme Leader," he said. "My people have done and are doing excellent work. I believe we will be able to complete the station almost exactly to your schedule."

He was good at keeping his face straight, but it felt as if Snoke could do his mindpeel thing even across lightyears -- Hux knew he couldn't but still, that's how it _felt_ \-- and he stared at a point ever so slightly to the holographic Snoke's left. "We have been monitoring transmissions, but as our task is limited to amplification and relay, I have not taken any action based on the content of those transmissions without your order."

"And you will not take any such action," said Snoke. "You will continue as you have been; as I said, your progress is adequate. It seems you have found the level of your competence, Hux. One communications array. One significant communications array, to be sure." Snoke was capable of smiling, but Hux could wish he wasn't. The curve of the mouth was a twist. "Perhaps you can handle a small extraneous task on top of your administrative duties. What do you think?"

He was very glad of the lightyears separating them. Very glad. "Sir," he said, also glad of the decades of training that made it possible to file away his reaction, the initial hot upwelling of anger and resentment and -- yes, all right, fine, _hurt_ that came with the words. "Sir" was safe. It could mean anything, but it did not _have_ to mean anything in particular. Unfortunately he knew he had to add something, and "I am honored to undertake the Supreme Leader's command" was the best he could manage. His chest was on fire.

"I thought you might still be willing to serve. Your loyalty --" and had he paused just fractionally on the word, or was Hux imagining that, a fit of miserable paranoia? -- "is appreciated. You will keep this station operational, and supervise it, and while you do -- keep also your ears peeled for any further transmissions involving Skywalker, and you will code those priority and forward them to me. Eyes-only, Hux. Security level eighteen." He offered the security clearance like a panacea. _Demoted_ , _exiled_ , but offered a balm of secrecy. 

Eighteen. He could hear Phasma saying _nineteen_ , and pushed it away -- and bowed slightly. "Yes, Supreme Leader. As you wish." 

Hux had been going to say something about...privilege, or loyalty, or something, but the tickle in his chest made him hold his breath instead, fighting down the cough. _Loyalty_. Had Snoke hammered on that for a particular reason?

"Very good," said Snoke. He gazed lidlessly at Hux. Then, like a child focusing some great lens upon an ant, he went on, "I am afraid you will be quite unable, while holding this position, to renew your acquaintance with my apprentice."

Hux stared at him, face blank, eyes wide. 

_Unable to renew your acquaintance with my apprentice_. In this position. That...that meant that there _was still an apprentice_ , didn't it, that it was merely the limits of the position that prevented it, that Ren was still alive, that Ren was _still alive_ \--

"I see, Supreme Leader," he said. "Lord Ren must have his own assignments."

"You demonstrate such understanding for someone who has performed so poorly in the past," said Snoke. "Indeed he does have his own assignments. Each person serves the Order as they are best capable." Another of those infinitesimal pauses. "Do you have anything else to report?"

And that was genius too, in a nasty understated kind of way: he wasn't sure how much Snoke _knew already_ and how much he had guessed and how much he didn't even suspect, and Hux was supposed to fill that in, with whatever reply he gave neatly answering the other questions. He made himself keep standing at attention, knees locked, middle fingers flat along the seams of his uniform breeches, and stared woodenly at the point just over Snoke's left shoulder. "No, sir," he said. "I will maintain vigilance and send any pertinent transmissions coded directly to you, sir. I --"

Hux couldn't _help_ it, and that was the worst fucking thing about this entire miserable experience, the complete lack of control over his own stupid, weak, unsatisfactory _body_ , but he couldn't _help_ the fit of dry harsh coughing: his breath caught in his throat like a fishhook and he was reduced to leaning on the edge of the desk to steady himself while he fought for air.

Snoke waited patiently through it, which was -- bad, and watched him the whole time, which was perhaps worse. When it was over, or at least as close to over as it ever was going to get, and Hux could look up again, Snoke said, "Physical decline is quite unbecoming in an officer. Perhaps you should take yourself to whatever medical bay you've managed to construct."

Hux wiped at his eyes and stood up straight again. "Your concern is appreciated, Supreme Leader," he said, his voice rasping. "Thank you for your advice." 

He was flushed not only with the miserable effort of coughing but with the furious humiliation of the entire business, and it took all the limited strength he had to meet Snoke's blue-glowing gaze and hold it.

Snoke made him maintain the eye contact for an agonizingly long moment. Then he said, "Very good. You are dismissed," and vanished from the projector as if he'd been a terrible mirage, never there at all.

Hux half-fell into his chair, holding on to the edge of the desk with bloodless fingers, and thought: _this cannot go on much longer, I will try as long as I am able, but I am running out of strength._

 

#

 

>   
>  _Hux—_
> 
> _I did not think – I was not aware that I was capable, I had always thought I was not, that such things were not meant for people like me – and yet you've written, clear, in your own hand that I know perhaps better now than I know my own – that you love me, that you would compare us to all of the songs and plots and they are illogical and people do such terrible things, all out of reason, from feeling this way –_
> 
> _\-- and I cannot spend any more time writing before I tell you that I love you, as clearly as I can: I love you, you oughtn't have to wonder if I do._
> 
> _That this letter will take weeks to reach you is unfair. That I have had to write it down rather than say it to your face is even worse. What do you mean that burning the flimsiplast hurts your chest. How is it that I cannot know if you are all right. I got off that planet and several more and I have dreamed – I won't write it down, if I write it down it might lend it credence and I can't –_
> 
> _We are both very bad at this, I think._
> 
> _I understand why the people in the operas behave as they do. I understand too well._
> 
> _Promise me you are not hurt._
> 
> _\- R_

 

#

 

He traced the words with his fingertip. It felt as if they ought to...burn, perhaps, or at least tingle, under his touch; felt like the contact ought to buzz in his brain. _I love you_ , Ren had written.

When it had just been himself, saying that, when he had written down the words and sent them off into the black not knowing if they ever would reach Ren, or what Ren would do with them if they did, he had been able to -- maintain. Hold on. For a space of days, perhaps even forget what he had written. But here, with the incontrovertible evidence that not only had he said the thing but that Ren had _read it_ , had heard his confession, had understood the terrible vast scope of what Hux was laying bare for him, that there was no plausible deniability and no going back and that he had finally _taken_ that last step off the precipice into clear air, and was falling, and would fall -- here and now, Hux could not breathe for _wanting_.

It had been terrible already, this separation, and he had thought it could not _be_ worse, but here it was, being worse, and he could not breathe. The cobwebs and dead leaves in his chest tangled themselves into an impenetrable knot. _I will show you everything_ , the gold crown had said to him. _I will show you what you most desire_ , and he had come close, he had come very close to putting it on, and it had only been the weight of responsibility pulling him back that had made it possible for Hux to let go of the thing. It was that same weight now which forced the arch of his ribs to expand, forced a ragged tearing gasp into his lungs, pushed back the darkness gathering at the edges of his vision. He drew another breath, and another, still difficult but no longer impossible, and made himself re-read the words again. 

_I love you_. 

_You will be quite unable to renew your acquaintance with my apprentice._

_You will hold the stars in your hands, and I will help you: I will be your strength, as much as I can be, for as long as you ask._

_Ohne dich kann ich nicht sein._ The songs are about us, he had said. They always have been. I simply could not see it, until now. 

_I must bear this, though I do not know how it can be borne, for the sake of all we have already done; for the sake of everyone whose lives depend on me, and for the future we hope to build. I must bear it, and so I will bear it, but sometimes, oh, Ren, sometimes the galaxy feels so very much too wide._


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> illustrated by [alopus](http://alopus.tumblr.com/)!

The _Dissident_ -class cruiser fell out of hyperspace like a long-cast arrow: an apparition that slid into view within hailing range of the station and blotted out a small but significant number of stars. It was neither announced nor expected. A shuttle, spat like a dark seed from its side, provided nothing but its serial number and angle of approach. In the station's narrow hangar, empty now without the ten antique TIE fighters that nominally made up its defensive forces, the technician on duty cleared the shuttle for landing, not knowing what else to do. Even mostly built, the station received shipments of parts with some regularity, and surely this – however unusual – was the same business.

What the shuttle disgorged was neither supplies nor the last disassembled pieces of an antenna array, but a tall man, black-clad from fingertip to throat, a ripped-out piece of the space between the stars. He spoke to no one and made no pronouncements. He scattered the hangar technicians in his wake, a series of tiny, helpless ricochets.

The tattered hems of his robes fluttered and swept behind him, the wings of some dark-pinioned bird, unmantled: the faceless curve of his mask like the keratin shine of a bloody beak. His boots clamored on the station's metal floors. He walked the corridors like a wraith, a summoned-up nightmare creature, come out of the heart of Snoke's First Order to wreak vengeance for treason. A trooper in the hangar bay, her face white, full up with nauseating secrets – Force-users could steal her thoughts, couldn't they? She'd been read in to the General's conspiracy seven months ago now, she believed in it with all her heart, and surely he knew, surely he would cut her down where she stood – tried to compose a warning, send it to command: _someone call for General Hux._ Lord Kylo Ren had appeared on the station, and would not be stopped.

There were four layers of personnel between her and the General. That message would not arrive in time.

Terror moved through the station like gossip, mouth to ear to mouth. There was not a single trooper in the First Order who hadn't heard of Kylo Ren: a scourge, uncontrollable in his rage. Awareness of his approach spread outward from the hangar like a stain, following close behind him. Everything was ruined; they were, each one of them, _found out_. On the bridge, the on-duty operations chief saw the alert of a priority message come up on his console the instant before the door irised open, and felt an intimation of disaster.

In the frame of that doorway Kylo Ren stopped flat, shock-still, like he'd been struck. He knew his hands were shaking – they had been since he stepped off the _Dark Heart_ \-- but as he approached that final barrier between himself and where he knew Hux would be the trembling had spread into a kind of violence, a nausea of anticipation. The confines of the mask were the only safety he had. He knew quite well he shouldn't be here; that he'd left their careful, hard-won planning in a shattered heap behind him, and yet –

At first, seeing Hux was _unreal_ : a vision like so many visions, like dreaming, like all the desperate recreations his mind and its Force-infused edges could summon up to make him weep in the dark. This Hux, standing at the center of the bridge, the only point of focus in the room – his face was drained of color, a paling grey-white that stretched over the sharp points of his cheekbones, translucent with shadows. The brightness of his hair was like a flashfire.

He stared at Ren, uncomprehending. His eyes were

_(holes in the world, salt-sky chips of light)_

_(no)_

blue gone so pale they might as well have been grey, and Ren saw him clutch at the console he stood behind as if he was about to collapse, and _reached_ , all the way open, wordless desperate mindtouch, a cradling pressure that would not let him fall -- the idea of Hux falling was too terrible to be borne, even if this Hux truly _was_ the nightmare light-spun _thing_ he had dreamed, he found that he still could not let him fall, he would catch that creature too, and to every hell with what would happen to him afterward.

~

Hux, in snapshots: the business of business, daily work, made harder and harder by how difficult it was becoming not to slide, not to lose the edges, not to let go. There was no fever, no failure of memory; only the gathering awareness that he was beginning to slip. Work, work, and the way the awful blue lozenges seemed to line his inside with sticky cold-burning sweetness, sickening, taking away all other tastes. Work, and avoiding the relative safety of his quarters because now the thing inside his music-box would not shut up, would not stop, wheedled and coaxed and commanded him to take it out once more and touch it and let its sick heat draw faint oil from his skin.

Work, and time, and grinding, endless, inexorable, implacable fatigue, and no promise that it would ever _not_ be like this; that this was all there was, all that could be, and that he must simply bear it.

He had been clinically aware for some time that he was beginning to lose continuity, but so far he thought it had limited itself to moments, flicker-flashes of time gone that no one noticed; that he had not yet begun to see things that were not there. When that happened, and he knew at some point it must, he would have _lost_ : would have failed, been unequal to the task, let everyone down -- every last one of them, the people who had mortgaged their lives to helping him make a different future. If he failed, they were lost. If he failed, all was lost. 

An hour ago he had sent Phasma and the station’s ten battered TIE fighters on their mission to rendezvous with the Tarkin fleet and Nova’s mercenary ships, and she would have to do the diplomacy bit _for_ Hux when she met with Cyril Tarkin and Eres Khataj, and that was not fair to Phasma, but there was no choice. Watching her go had been terrible; the awareness that the station was now entirely without defenses, and would _be_ without defenses, was worse. Without Phasma there, the station’s crew was relying solely and directly upon him, and he was not sure how much longer he would be _capable_ of command. How much longer he had, before small errors became inexcusable failures. 

And when the door to the command chamber irised open on black drapery and a faceless battered horror of a mask, Hux _knew_ , knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he had begun to hallucinate in deadly earnest: that he could no longer trust his own perception, and therefore could no longer _be_ trusted, that he had passed beyond acceptable limits into incapability.

He stood frozen, the thud of adrenaline dumping into his blood with such force he almost heard it, staring across the room at the gorecrow-phantom that was Kylo Ren, and thought: _it is over, and I have lost the war for us after all, before a single shot could be fired, it is all for nothing_. All the blood -- precious little of it -- in his face drained away like water from a broken glass, leaving nothing but the blank blue-grey holes of his eyes, the staring copper of his hair: even his lips were colorless and dry. He did not know it, but he did not look entirely _human_ , just at that moment: looked like a hollow shell, a Hux-thing built to imitate reality.

And then the dead hush of the room impinged on his surge of thought and Hux realized, slowly, that he was not the only person twisted round to stare at the newcomer; that if he was hallucinating Ren then _so was everybody else_ , and that this meant Ren was --

Ren was _real_ , and that was not possible at all.

Hux stared. And then could no longer stare past a fizzing overflow of multicolored sparkles that began at the edges of his vision and irised in, replacing the room with silver-grey blankness. 

He could still feel, and his hand closed with desperate sudden tightness on the edge of the console, but the glowing blankness refused to fade and the floor-panels were threatening to tilt as if the station’s gravgen orientator was beginning to fail. He could hardly breathe, the dry cobwebs in his chest threatening to choke him. The floor gave a sickening heave beneath his feet: Hux’s grip on the edge of the console would not hold his weight, and he knew he was falling, knew he would fall, and part of him hoped that it _was_ over, that he could let go -- 

\-- and then something firm and strong and unyielding _caught him_. 

The shock of it was enough to push away the terrible silver sparkles, and they began to retreat, began to fade enough for him to see past the brilliant patterns they made, to see _Kylo Ren_ still standing in the doorway. Hux was aware of nothing like hands holding him up, nothing so specific, so limited: he was somehow wrapped in invisible support, the air solidifying itself to let Hux lean on it and not have to try to balance. A dizzy flicker of memory crossed his mind: Kellan, in the snow, and Ren steadying him with his brain, the same formless firm support he leaned on now. 

All of this went through his head in moments, _a_ moment, and the awareness of everybody else’s attention flooded him like icewater. Hux forced himself upright, desperately grateful for the shifting support of the air that reshaped itself around him, and then _made himself_ let go of the console and take a step, and then another step, toward the figure in the doorway. 

It took him much too long in dead awful silence to cross the chamber to Ren, to look up at the blank curve of the mask, moving with the slightly exaggerated care of someone who has drunk more than is good for him. When he found his voice it was a racked and whispery ruin, but the silence let it carry: “Lord Ren,” he said. “A word with you in private, if you please.”

Ren did not move for an endless terrible moment, everything hazed-over with unreality. Then he nodded, a sharp acquiescing tilt of the mask, and turned away all at once to stride out of command, like a man pulling an arrow from a wound.

Ren turning away from him hurt, felt like a light being shut off again after months of darkness, a surge of night; speaking hurt, everything hurt, his chest and throat sore like wind-scoured skin, and the drowning horror of thinking, _I am seeing things that are not there, I am mad, I have lost the battle and everything will fall with me, everything is broken and over and done_ , was slow to fade. But it was Ren, or something that looked like Ren, and his battered brain was trying not to let himself believe the truth because if he did believe it then he would have exactly no defenses left whatsoever, and _would_ fall. 

But Ren held him up, that firm shifting cradle of air steadying him and refusing to allow gravity to have its way, and they moved out of the command center into the hall and cold air made him shiver and gasp and he _needed to be alone with Ren, right now he needed it, there were simply no more choices to be made._

Ahead of him, Ren took five long assured strides down the corridor as if he knew just where he was going, and then came to a stuttering halt. He turned back towards Hux.

Feather-light, nearly wordless; Ren inside his mind, where he had been missing for so long: _where? Please --_

After the initial fizz and surge of bright silver static had subsided there had been enough left of Hux's conscious awareness to think in an agonizingly slow but steady line -- rather than a series of flaring images of fear and terror and worst of all _failure._ But having Ren in his head hurt terribly, precisely because he had _wanted_ Ren there for months now, wanted so much, so badly, that every mental surface was -- raw, tenderized. He could think, just about, now that there was a little blood back in his brain, but he couldn’t exactly make thought into words, into a coherent sentence, so much as just directional impulse. It was a little like being drunk on the fatigue poisons flooding his brain, although he had grown used to them over the past months; they were too familiar for him to mind so very much.

His quarters were only a little way down the corridor, even with the careful not-quite-balanced steps he was taking, and the door opened to his shaking hand; and inside they were -- something close to safe. There was a sudden _hush_ : the sounds of the station dim compared to those of a working ship, just the faint hum of the air circulation and the catch and rasp of Hux's breath.

Ren lifted his hands to take off his mask. It slid from his nerveless fingers to the floor, making an astonishingly loud noise, and rolled: Hux thought somewhere beyond all this of Ren taking it off, in his rooms, back before everything happened; when he hadn't been able to stop himself reaching out to touch that hair. He would...have touched it now, if he thought he could, but all of his bones had cores of lead and gravity was not pulling but _drawing_ him against the invisible support of Ren's magic. 

_Call it that,_ Hux thought, _what it is: magic._

A single bright thread of thought, Ren asking: _what happened to you?_

Hux stared into black-crystal eyes that were no longer his imagination, somehow real and made real and present when they _should not be_ ; wished he could trust his ridiculously heavy hand to rise and touch Ren's hair, his face, that well-known and well-beloved architecture of bone underneath the glow-pale skin. It was impossible. Thought and intelligence and motive force were all blocked and dammed off by the single overwhelming question he could no longer repress: _are you real?_ and then _how are you real?_

It was a question he would never in his right mind have thought to ask, but Hux was not exactly in his right mind; had not been entirely in his right mind for months now. 

He caught the edges of some surge of feeling, Ren thinking _Am I?_ , a surge of vertigo, an unbearable uncertainty like an infection between them, _am I really here, am I dreaming even now, there's too much space between us_ \-- wondered, distantly, if this was what it was like when Ren overheard his own thoughts -- and then a spill of tumbling confession, Ren telling him _I couldn't stay away from you, I promise I'm real, forgive me._

Hux was aware of a flicker of profound, calming gratitude: yes of course this was Ren and he was real, nobody else in the entire universe was quite like this, there must be a valid and believable explanation, and oh, gods, _couldn't stay away_ , it was the songs, it was all of the songs, all of the poems, he’d been right, he was _right_ , this was how it _worked_ , this was _ohne dich kann ich nicht sein_ \--

\-- and then conscious thought was snatched away from him entirely, as every last one of Ren's mental shields, the barriers that kept a Force-sensitive from dissolving into the mind and heart of any other person close enough, _vanished_.

Ren had always kept shields up: even in the height of intimacy, drowning gloriously in gold he had never gone _all_ the way open like this: it wasn't safe. It wasn't safe but it wasn't sufficient (nothing was sufficient while they were still not touching) and if he stripped away enough of those crystalline walls Hux would _believe him_ and then Ren would be sure he was really here.

It wasn't the deadly, destructive leap-to-ground of arc flash; this was something wider, deeper, the titanic, unstoppable, headlong rush of a tsunami. All that Ren was _flooded_ Hux, dissolving his tenuous grip on reality, sending him helplessly borne on that tide like a drowning man rolled over and over in the liquid ropes of an uncaring ocean; there was no air, there was no light, there was no control, and he could not breathe, now, truly he could not breathe, and found in the few fractured catches of thought left to him that he did not mind. 

His eyes rolled back to show just a slit of white between the copper lashes, and he folded up, with a little sigh.

Ren caught him twice: first with the Force and then with his hands. He did not think through doing it; it was instinct and autonomic function. He was not capable of letting Hux fall, and so he did not let him. The contact -- all the too-slight weight of him suddenly rendered _physical_ , in Ren's arms -- was like closing a circuit: that tide gone to bright, bright fire, a succession of flashbulb images.

_The spikes of pink desert flowers scattered on rain-soaked concrete, glowing under neon streetlights. He doesn't know where the edges of his mind are. He knows: that he is touching Hux, or that he is being touched. The bone-deep ache of exhaustion. The smell of blaster-fried brains, spattered, flash-cooked. Char. An unfolding endless grey time -- the glitter of a champagne flute in narrow, delicate hands, turning under starlight -- the merciless sun like a coin in the sky. The weight of it. The weight of it which is the same as the grey bleak_ endlessness the taste of burnt salt on the tongue the horizon wavers into mirage --

_He tries to stop it, but his hands are nothing beside the flood-tide. He thinks he is going to press bruises into Hux's skin, can feel them bloom there, poison flowers (the kind that grew on Eriadu), and he is -- they are -- shaking, so hard Ren cannot keep his feet, can only manage a controlled collapse onto the hard metal floor, Hux borne safely to the ground in his arms._

_He presses his face into Hux's shoulder. At some point he had begun crying, and he cannot remember when, or if he had started it, or if it is he who is crying at all._

_Projected against the swamp-miasma that is Hux's mind: there is an instant of dark, with moving stars: and then it is not dark at all, but brilliant light, the flicker and fade and glimpse-out-of-time of individual frames in a holo, cut directly into one another. It is as dizzying, as disconcerting, as the shifting moving transforming sound and vision that comes with fever past a certain dangerous point._

_Places he has never visited, and things he has never seen, all brilliantly clear in fractured moments, and then gone again into one another. A kaleidoscopic confusion of memories that are not his own, and yet some of it_ is _familiar, terribly familiar, that desert sky in which blue had burnt to white, a flat blow against eyes and mind; sweaty glister of light on concrete and other less describable surfaces; shaky mirage like the haze above burning oil, and to Hux it is the glow and glare and many-voiced chitter and gobble and murmur of the thing in its locked box which he was not allowed to touch, lest it devour what was left of his mind, bite into the meat of his brain as a man might bite into soft fruit. The hollow space between them that was the cathedral vault of Hux's mind and is now a patchworked, half-drowned place, a ruined temple of green-white marble flickering to deserts, full of the drawing hum of_ the thing in its box, the bright crown, oh gods it makes such promises _\-- and intercut with these a terrible echo, a sense of his own voice or sight or mind reflected back at him: grey grinding misery, exhaustion, familiar but somehow made appalling. Things he has lived through, borne, survived, bent through a prism which renders them unspeakable, and_ that _was unspeakable in itself._

Hux could not feel it when they subsided to the floor, or when Ren buried his face against Hux's shoulder, or the hot astonishing touch of his tears; he was still much too far away. He lay in Ren's arms heavy with the helpless weight of unconsciousness. But the altered position brought some of the rather attenuated blood back to his head, and in a few moments he began to stir, with a soft confused little sound.

That little helpless noise, like a lightning-shock gone to ground: something incontrovertibly _now_ , of _this place_. Ren thought that there must be a way back into himself after all, because he could not bear -- could not, would not allow -- Hux to be hurt, and this collapse was hurting them _both_. When he was a child, long before he understood anything more about the Force than the dizzying _scale_ of the thing, the overwhelming perception -- when, in fact, he had been too young to know that _seeing_ was of both the light and the dark, at once -- then, his uncle had taught him to be _quiet_ inside his mind. To _not look_ , when looking hurt. There was such a large space between that child and the man slumped on the floor like a discarded black rag, clutching Hux to his chest: a near-insurmountable space full of a thousand scattered and broken stars.

And yet, slowly: a drawing up of edges, enough space between them also to breathe.

Ren said _Hux?_ and _I'm sorry._ Nothing so complex, in that statement, as _forgive me_ ; the voice of Ren's mindtouch was much too young for that, miserable and lost. 

Hux had been badly hurt once or twice in his life -- other than the times in his childhood when his body had failed him for reasons beyond his control -- and he was familiar with that moment in half-consciousness, waking up, when the enormity and scale of pain was apparent but not yet accepted or engaged with: that moment where one was aware of just how badly it was going to hurt, soon, and how much one wished to remain on this side of that pain, in the quiet confusing darkness where things had not yet become entirely real. 

This was that same hesitation, reluctance to engage -- and then Ren's voice came out of the confusion, recognizably Ren's voice but much too small, appallingly small and _hurting_ , in a way Kylo Ren should not ever hurt. Hux stopped paying attention to how unpleasant consciousness was going to be and just reached for him, clumsily, with his mind; and in the outside world his hand which weighed approximately a hundred pounds rose to drift over Ren's drapery, fingers closing in the soft black folds, hanging on. That sequence of images had been -- terrible, and perhaps more terrible because he thought at least some of it might have been _his_ fault, that his lack of ability to shield had done Ren harm, he should never have had to see any of the grey exhaustion, that was _not his problem_ \--

He tried to say something and couldn't, the air catching in his sore chest the way it always did these days, sending him into raw exhausted coughing, the dry useless bark of self-perpetuating irritation, and he just hung on and waited for it to be over. 

Ren's hands smoothed down his spine. _Warm_.

The sheer unexpected, unplanned-for, unanticipated _comfort_ of that touch was almost too much for Hux, almost sent him back out into the hazy sequence of memories which were not Hux's own but which were upsettingly _something like_. Ren's warmth, the pressure of his hands, seemed to ease the miserable endless urge, and the cough let go much sooner than usual. He pressed his face against Ren's chest, breathing as carefully as he could so as not to set it off again -- gods but it hurt, it felt like things were _tearing_ sometimes in the middle of the worst fits -- and tried to get his mind to work. Ren's hands were so warm, and all he wanted to do was let go of consciousness, and he couldn’t. 

Ren asked, again, as he had asked before the shields went down: _what happened? How did this happen to you?_

Fitting thoughts together felt like assembling a puzzle while drunk. Ren wasn't making sense. The fact that he was here was glorious, but it was also not making sense. Hux hung on to that thought, which at least offered some stability. _Nothing happened to me_ , he managed, after a moment or two. _How are you here?_

_I sent you that letter_ , Ren told him, still holding on, his hands bleeding warmth through Hux's uniform tunic and down through his skin, _and then I couldn't get it out of my head, I couldn't write what I wrote to you and stay away, so I_ \-- He paused, and they were still so closely linked inside their minds that Hux could feel the way he braced, the way the tone of his mind slipped slightly ashamed, sharp, as if he were daring Hux to laugh at him. _I took the last of the credit chips and I blanked the ship's transmit frequencies and ran as stealth as something that big can manage and -- commandeered it? I know I shouldn't have._

Then, more strident: _Except clearly I should have, what do you_ mean _nothing happened to you, look at you. There's nothing left of you._

_Oh_ , Hux said, and blinked up at him, eyes wide. The thought of Ren… _doing that_ , of him taking the _Dark Heart_ and just...coming here, leaving behind everything they'd planned for and worked for and suffered for, because he couldn't stay away -- it was almost incomprehensible. And the part of Hux's mind which had been locked off and squashed and sat on and half-choked into quiescence because he _had not been able to afford it_ , afford the misery it brought, suddenly shouldered its way back into existence: this was Ren, this was really Ren, _here, holding him_ , exactly as he'd tried so hard not to dream of for _months_ now. All the music he hadn't been able to listen to was trying to play itself at once, a cacophony of excitement. 

And the way Ren had paused and seemed to gather himself for that confession _ached_. It was not acceptable that Ren should sound like that, as if he was expecting Hux to -- laugh, or be actually angry at the collapse of their conspiracy, when all he _could_ be was exhausted and slightly delirious with delight.

He pressed himself closer, burrowing against Ren's chest, clinging. _Oh, good_ , he added, and then after a few moments _I'm all right, it's just a cold or something, everyone had it, that doesn't matter, nothing matters, you're here_.

_You're not all right_ , Ren said, but it was a very token protest; the feeling of Hux in his arms, weight and pressure and warmth, was too intense of a realization for Ren to do anything but gather him closer, wrap around him, hold on as tightly as he could. Hux was aware of the force of it, even through the fragile recreated shield: he could feel Ren’s reluctance to think about anything but this, least of all how he had left their plan in shattered pieces behind him, all for the sake of -- for _love_. 

Ren said it out loud, with that same desperate and tumbling bravery, bracing for humiliation and still needing to _say it_ , to be sure, to let Hux know _why_ he'd ruined everything they'd worked for: "I love you. I meant it. Mean it. Your stupid operas. This is right out of one of them, isn't it."

Hux almost laughed at the sheer echo of it, the mirroring, his realization and Ren's fitting into each other like intertwining fingers -- and caught himself in time: that invariably ended up turning into a long miserable coughing fit, and Ren did not sound or feel as if he was up for laughter just at the moment. He just pressed his cheek against the soft black drapery and clung. "It's entirely out of opera," he said, in that raspy wreck of a voice. "It's all the operas, every one of them. I love you -- completely, and I am no good at it, and I'm doing it anyway because I can't not. Gods, I missed you so _much_ , all the time, I kept hoping it would hurt less and it...didn't, and...there wasn't anything to do but hold on and hope."

The weight on his shoulders, in his bones, around the rims of his eye sockets, squeezing his chest -- all of it seemed to have shattered like shaken glasswork, and all the falling glittering pieces had turned themselves into a haze of stars. It didn't matter any more that breathing hurt. Nothing mattered at all except that Ren was here, Ren was holding him, he was _safe_ again, in a way he had not been for so long. 

"I should have come sooner," Ren said, "if I was going to do this at all I should have done it before you were hurt. I really _am_ sorry. For waiting so long and for -- what I did a minute ago and for coming at all when I shouldn't have and I've ruined everything again, haven't I?" His hands slipped up and down Hux's spine, tracing, soothing. He might have been trying to soothe himself as much as Hux. There was a tremulous edge to his voice, a kind of anticipatory flinch; and yet, through the mindtouch, a descant echo, _I love you_ , in neither of their voices but some kind of hybrid chord that resonated between them.

The touch was ridiculously pleasant: Hux imagined the warmth of Ren's hands sending out that gold light through the raw soreness of his airways, soothing the irritation, calming. It felt _so_ nice, and so...grounding, somehow, so real, that he was capable of reaching up to tug gently on a lock of Ren's hair (which he wanted to never stop touching) and making a small exasperated noise: "Hush," he said. "I'm not _hurt_ , nothing's happened to me, we haven't even had a serious accident this whole project. I'm just...very bad at bearing things, and I ought not to be, but never mind, it's over. It's over. You're here." 

He closed his eyes, opened them again slowly, pressing close to Ren's chest. "You haven't ruined anything. You _can't_ ruin this, or not without an awful lot of effort. I love you. I love you so much. I'll work out what happens next, I'll adjust the strategy to suit the situation, just _don't let go of me_. Don't...go away again, I don't think I can bear it a second time."

He couldn't help coughing, either, but that didn't matter: he just held on to Ren and waited, again, for it to be over, and barely even minded the pain. Ren didn't for an instant stop from rubbing those soothing circles over Hux's back, and held onto him through the worst of it. The collapsed slippage when he'd lost his shields was still close enough that Hux knew he was thinking, because Hux was thinking of it, of Felthor, when he had in desperation worked a small miracle with the Force -- and how he didn't trust himself enough now, after that _slippage_ , to wash away every pain in gold. 

Nobody had ever _done this_ for Hux before, when he’d been ill, ever touched him like this, ever tried to _help_ \-- not that he would have let them, most likely, but it was a little astonishing how very pleasant it actually felt to have Ren's hand firm and warm against his back, rubbing in circles. He didn't know if it was just the power of suggestion or if the warmth and pressure were actually doing something, but it seemed to work. Instead of going on and on for several raw miserable minutes the paroxysm decided to let go, and he could just lean against Ren and breathe. Carefully. 

It was a lot nicer than horrible blue menthol lozenges, and rather more effective. 

"I couldn't possibly go anywhere," Ren was saying, "I came all this way, I'm _not_ leaving. I may never leave you again." He leaned into the hand Hux had tangled in his hair, his eyes drifting closed. Hux wondered, suddenly, if no one had touched Ren, no one at all, since the last time Hux had been in his arms; the thought was terrible, and he _realized_ it was terrible, and realized it was also probably true. 

"... We're on the _floor_ ," Ren added, as if this had just struck him.

They were, indeed, on the floor, and Hux listened to Ren say this out loud, feeling the vibrations of his voice as well as hearing it, and he gave the almost-soundless half-laugh that would not set off the cough again. "We are," he said. "Full marks for observation."

"We shouldn't be," Ren said, making the decision suddenly and completely, the way he’d always done even when the decisions were quite, quite ill-advised. But now he tightened his arms around Hux, taking all of his negligible weight, and murmured, low and anticipatory: "Trust me."

Hux would have liked to advance the opinion that this was a very silly thing to say because _of course_ he trusted him, that was not a matter in the slightest question, but just then they both lifted smoothly from the floor, gravityless, floating on the pressure of the Force alone. 

Floating, the way Ren had floated objects to show off -- and then to demonstrate, and explain, his command of the Force, was the most remarkable sensation Hux had experienced in a long time. It bore some similarities to freefall, but freefall had a gyroscopic volatility that this did not: there was nothing of the vertiginous spatial confusion or the dizzying sense of fullness in the head that Hux knew very well from zero-G training exercises. He thought vaguely that birds must feel like this, soaring on high thermals, buoyed up, weightless and yet supported: the two of them borne aloft through the impulse of Ren's mind, carried across the narrow room, and deposited -- in nearly the same position as they had been on the floor -- on Hux's bed.

He clung to Ren in something close to wonder, with flicker-flashes of what must be _joy_ shot through it like threads in silk. It was over far too soon, although he was undeniably grateful for the change of venue, and Hux sighed softly.

" _There_ ," said Ren, sounding terribly smug. "Much better." He had arranged Hux across his chest, close enough that he could reach out, cup the back of Hux's skull, and hold him quite still to be kissed.

It was a hesitant kiss, for all that smugness: as if Ren was afraid, still, that something he was doing would shatter Hux apart, and Ren with him.

Hux was very much not at his best, physical and mental exhaustion and ill-health dragging at his thoughts, but _nothing_ seemed to matter in the slightest: he was in Ren's arms, this was not a dream, he would not wake choking on clear air to find himself _still_ cruelly alone; this was real, this was happening, and...Ren's lips were warm. Warm, and soft. All of the remaining tension ran out of Hux, and he smiled, and his face felt strange for smiling: it was not a thing he had been doing much, just lately. 

He could not quite trust his voice, and so he said it soundlessly: _I love you_. 

_I love you_ , Ren said back to him, and again, sharper, wonderstruck from saying it: _I love you and I'm not sorry I came back._ And -- carefully -- he traced the curve of Hux's smile with the edge of his thumb.

#

This sector of space was supposed to be _empty_.

Empty of everyone but Captain Phasma, ten aging TIEs occupied by her troopers, and a fleet of mismatched but unpleasantly efficient battleships belonging to Eres Khataj, that was.

Khataj saw them first -- Phasma tried not to mind that her mercenaries had better equipment than Phasma’s own troopers, but wasn’t managing not minding very well -- and her voice crackled across the interfleet comm channel: “We have company. Friends of yours, Captain?”

A wing -- no, _shit_ , at least two full wings -- of TIE/sf Special Forces starfighters. One of Snoke’s spearpoints, in a hurry to get somewhere, and if they caught Phasma’s ship transponders on their sensors everybody was in a very great deal of trouble --

“Go to full cloak,” Phasma snapped to her own TIEs. A moment later the viewports of her fast-attack ship fuzzed with the refraction-interference of the cloaking field as she activated the generator. It wasn’t _enough,_ she knew the TIE/sfs had much better scanners than these ships did, they were at least fifteen years younger and the tech had improved enormously, it wasn’t _enough_ and any moment now they were going to ping somebody’s fields and then there was going to have to be a firefight, and it was going to have to be a firefight that left not one First Order ship alive and capable of making a report. 

And the war would have begun.

All of this flashed across Phasma’s mind in a moment of cold glassy clarity, and her hands were already at the controls, preparing to throw all spare power into the forward laser cannon arrays, when Khataj’s voice came across the comm a second time. “Tell your ships to maintain position, Captain. Luz, Beren, Izorbasha, the rest of you, all power to cloaking generators, surround them close enough to overlap.”

Phasma had no idea what she was talking about, but gave the command; a moment later the neat arrowhead formation of Khataj’s ships broke and moved rapidly closer to her and her fighters, approaching them from several angles at once. They were enveloped by a shrinking sphere of warships, and Phasma realized what Khataj was doing even as the blur of her viewports tripled behind a much more powerful cloaking field. 

They were being hidden. Shielded neatly behind the mercenary ships’ high-end stealth capability, she and her fighters were invisible even to the TIE/sfs’ advanced scanners. And not a moment too soon: she could see the red-green flickers of light all around them as those scanner waves hit and were deflected instantly around the invisible curve of the cloaking fields, to reform beyond them as if nothing at all had been in their way. 

Phasma waited. More flickers, faster, and then one or two, and then nothing at all. On her own scanners the First Order wings were moving, continuing on their way, apparently unconcerned by whatever they’d picked up or failed to pick up. Phasma and her ships had not been seen.

She let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding, and said “Thank you,” which felt entirely inadequate. Beyond the viewports the stars sprang back into sharp focus as the cloaking fields were switched off and Khataj’s people eased out of the sphere formation. 

“Don’t mention it, Captain. But I think we should recalculate our approach and make the rest of the journey in a series of jumps, in case anyone _is_ following us.”

“I agree,” Phasma said, thinking _damn, damn, damn_ , and switched to her group’s frequency. “All craft, we are preparing to begin the jump sequence earlier than expected. Get to your assigned vessels in the Nova fleet and lock down as fast as possible.”

She watched as her ten fighters peeled off and split up to approach the mercenary ships which had been assigned to transport them for the superluminal legs of the journey. None of her TIEs had a hyperdrive of its own -- that had been Special Forces issue even back in Imperial days -- but at least they didn’t take up much space in their new allies’ freight bays. It still rankled, having to effectively beg a ride from Khataj’s people even this early in the game, but there was no other workable option. 

Once her people were all safely on board, confirmed by the Nova ships’ crew, Phasma got back on the comm to Khataj’s flagship, the _Gripping Hand_ , and requested coordinates for the jump. It seemed to take entirely too long for Khataj’s navicomp to transmit the sequence of numbers that would guide them to the first of their destinations, but finally her console lit up green. “Received,” she said. “I’m prepared to make the jump to hyperspace on your mark.”

“Very good, Captain,” Khataj said, and her astrogator counted them down. And, as the stars first stretched into blue-white lines and then blurred into the chaotic brilliance of hyperspace, Phasma leaned back and ran her hands through her short-cropped hair. 

This wasn’t what she was _good_ at. Phasma was a soldier, a leader of soldiers, and subscribed to the general three-part soldiers’ philosophy: _one, obey orders; two, give it to the enemy good and hard; three, don’t die_. This...false-flag stuff, hiding behind the skirts of mercenary ships, coming up with complicated cover stories for their operations, was not Phasma’s strength, and she knew that. 

As cover stories went, though, the one which she and Hux had developed was pretty decent. They needed a reason for Phasma to leave the station, taking with her its entire complement of aging and battered starfighters, ten in all, other than _to rendezvous with their allies in the upcoming military coup_. Hux had done a bit of pacing, hands behind his back, and that had been… _familiar_ , a piece of the reality she was used to, and Phasma found herself disproportionately cheered up by it even before he stopped and raised a finger and said “Pirates.”

“Pirates,” she had repeated, and then “Our supply shipments,” almost exactly in unison with Hux. It made perfect sense: the station was supplied not from FO headquarters, that was much too far away, but from more local sources, subcontracted to the First Order. Regular shipments were sent in from three separate vendors, and they _had_ in fact had a bit of trouble with a gang of roving scavengers attacking the shipments en route. Phasma had sent out a few troopers in TIEs to demonstrate to the pirates the error of their ways, and that had been the end of it, but “A _large_ gang of pirates. We might need to send out a stronger defensive force to handle them.”

“We might, in fact,” Hux said, “have to send out _all_ the station’s fighters. Under your command. In that rather dreadful fast-attack ship, I’m sorry it’s in such bad shape but it’s all headquarters is inclined to let us have.”

“I think it would be wise, tactically speaking, to present a show of force to this pirate gang,” Phasma agreed, solemnly.

“Quite so, Captain. I’ll contact Lady Tarkin and Lord Khataj and tell them to prepare for a rendezvous.”

He had given her one of those quick flickering smiles, and she was still _worried_ about him, he was so thin, much too thin, and she thought his cough was actually getting worse again, but the pacing -- and his little smile -- made Phasma think that everything might just be all right after all.

Possibly.

They had come very, very close just now to setting everything off before anyone was prepared. 

Phasma closed her eyes against the brightness of hyperspace, and forced herself to relax. They _hadn’t_ started the war. She and Lord Khataj would rendezvous with the Tarkin fleet at Frey’s Hope and this was going to _work_ , this was going to go right, they were going to _win_.

~

They'd dropped out of hyperspace after the second of five planned jumps, when Khataj insisted that Phasma join her for a meal on the _Gripping Hand_. It was a frustrating habit of hers: the unavoidable polite summons. Phasma knew quite well what Khataj wanted – to look her in the face and see if there was evidence that she'd flinched during their near-miss encounter with the First Order.

She wore her armor, polished to a silver brilliance, but left her helmet behind. It wouldn't do for her troopers to think she was intimidated by a Chiss warlord. (It wouldn't do for her to _be_ intimidated by a Chiss warlord, even one who responded to crisis with decisive action the way Khataj did.)

They met on the _Gripping Hand_ 's bridge, which was a functional, well-used space with surprisingly state-of-the-art consoles, painted in blues and reds; it looked garish, to eyes that were used to the clean lines of the First Order, but Phasma could tolerate a little bit of eccentricity.

Khataj handed her a glass of pale-gold wine, and said, "What an interesting campaign this is going to be, Captain Phasma." The crystals woven into her hair glittered.

"We did promise you sufficient action to be worth your time," Phasma said.

"So you did. Shall we drink to that?" Khataj lifted her glass. The wine caught the reflection of the few stars that dotted this sector. Phasma suspected Khataj knew exactly what image she was projecting. "Or perhaps we should drink to the achievement of your goals. Yours, and your – General's."

That little hesitation. It was a challenge. (People like Khataj kept their positions, Phasma was well aware, by issuing a thousand of those tiny challenges a day. This entire invitation was one of them.)

The idea came to her all in a rush, and she thought, as she tilted her own glass to the light, that this must be what Hux felt like as he came up with plans like this one that had sent her out into the galaxy, smokescreened and mostly safe.

"To the Empire reborn," Phasma said. The words rolled off her tongue easily. They sounded – grand. "And to His Imperial Majesty, General Hux."

She was pretty sure no one had ever made that toast before. It wasn't exactly like starting the war, but it was damn close.

Their glasses rang when they touched the rims together. "Long may he reign," Khataj added, graciously enough.

The wine was dry and sharp, harsh in her sinuses. The tiny bubbles rising in it could have been ships going into hyperspace, slipping out of the regulated universe in disappearing lines.

#

Kylo Ren had never been good at being still. Left to his own devices he would pace a room, go through its drawers and cabinets, rifle the minds of its inhabitants absent-mindedly; he _could_ meditate, could make himself calm and silent and stay that way for hours, his knees folded under him, insteps pressed flat to the ground, but he didn't _like_ it and never had.

Yet, he had spent the last two hours drifting in stillness, Hux cradled in his arms, asleep. He'd watched some of the terrible drawn tension seep out of his face, slowly; watched his breathing even out from controlled faint rasps to a deeper, less-ragged rhythm. He didn't understand how Hux could brush aside the wreckage of his lungs, say _it's over now_ so simply, and then fall bonelessly asleep in Ren's arms as if it truly _was_ \-- Ren wanted to believe him, wanted to have Hux be the person who _knew what was going on_. (No one did. He had been out in the vast black of the galaxy with the vertiginous scale of the Force weighing on every corner of his mind and he was all too sure that _no one did know_ , but he wanted someone to; it would be best if that someone was Hux.)

He oughtn't to have come back. (He should have come back sooner; he should never have left Hux alone.) Snoke's spynet would have caught wind of the unauthorized movements of the _Dark Heart_ by now; soon a report would go back to the Supreme Leader and he would draw his inevitable conclusions and Ren would have brought more than just terror to this station: he would have brought blood and destruction in _truth_ , like a plague-carrier.

But Hux was asleep _in his arms_ and he could not have borne it if Hux had _truly_ been hurt. By the time he'd sent that letter, the desperate confession, Ren had not been able to bear very much at all. It had taken hardly more than a day for him to make the decision; another to fail to talk himself out of it.

At least there would be this short time, snatched away from the rest of the galaxy, before everything went wrong for good.

Hux was too thin, worryingly thin: Ren could feel all the individual processes of his spine, the curves of his ribs, even through the uniform. At least he wasn’t feverish; the cheek resting against Ren's chest was nothing more than warm through his drapery. He was -- not _very_ deeply asleep, Ren could tell, although every cell in his body clearly cried out for rest: his mind refused to let go entirely, the humming energy of his thoughts as loud as it had ever been. For so long he had wanted this, dreamed of this, and much of him didn't want to sleep through any of it. Ren listened; it was a privilege to be _able_ to, to watch the ripple of Hux's emotions as if he was looking through a stained-glass window. To be close enough to _overhear_.

Hux sighed softly, his fingers curling around the fold of black drapery he had been clinging to even in his sleep, and after a few moments his eyelashes parted. He was so pale that they stood out absurdly against his skin, glittering, almost metallic in the flat light of his quarters. 

"Hush," Ren said, softly, "go back to sleep --" He could not bring himself to loosen his grip. There wasn't enough left of Hux for him to be sure that he wouldn't just -- dissolve, somehow, into smoke and mirrors, if Ren let go of him. He looked like he’d been spun out of glass and wire.

Hux scowled a little, and pressed closer to Ren, settling more comfortably against him. "Later," he said. "I've missed you so much, I -- did not know it was possible, to miss someone so much, and not to _know_ whether you were safe, somewhere out there in the galaxy, not to know anything about the dangers you were facing, it was...difficult." 

General Hux was given to understatement. Not exactly to the _sub-optimal_ level, but it was a partly conscious habit. Ren, however, was given to outright untruth, if he thought it would serve a purpose: he settled his hands on Hux's back, one between the wings of his shoulderblades and one low on the curve of his spine, and said, "I was safe. -- Almost all the time. People don't realize that it's very difficult to actually _shoot_ a Force-user." 

He was also absolutely no good at being reassuring at _all_ , it turned out.

" _What?_ " Hux demanded, pulling back enough to stare at Ren. "What happened?"

"Nothing _happened_ ," said Ren, snippily, "someone thought he could rob me, and shot one of our troopers in order to have a letter of yours for a lure, and he learned better. That's all. I was fine." 

The memory coiled up between them like smoke: the cooked-meat smell of blaster bolt through flesh. The raw burn across Ren's shoulder where the first shot had grazed him. The bright hot _rage_ he'd felt, right before he'd let the second bolt scream through his assailant's skull.

He hadn't meant to show Hux that much of it. 

Open as he was, he could watch Hux's reaction: the initial shock response, cold and hot at once, and then a growing, dawning horror. Both for the murder of the trooper, who was dead because of Hux's own need to send Kylo Ren letters from across the galaxy -- _they purpose not their deaths when they purpose their services_ , Hux was thinking, as clear to Ren as if he'd said it aloud, a phrase he must have repeated to himself often, when getting right down to the awful calculus of what were and were not acceptable losses -- and for the danger to Ren himself. Hux sucked in a sharp breath, and it started him coughing again, but he didn't wait until he could speak to say _that should not have happened._

_No,_ Ren agreed miserably, _it shouldn't have. But it did. That was the worst of it. Mostly._ He tried to elide the rest of _the worst of it_ , closing off parts of his mind so Hux did not see, or did not _have_ to see the desert and the salt flat, the flickers of heat one could drown in. Instead Ren lined up his fingers across the hollows of his heaving ribs, warm weight. Aloud, he said, "Why haven't you gone to medical? This is _awful_."

"-- I'm --" Hux said, and then Ren watched him decide that he really could not even to himself pretend that "fine" was anything other than ridiculous, right now. "It's not awful, it's just annoying, and it hasn't been...important."

The topmost layers of Hux's mind had always been transparent to Ren; transparent and _loud._ There was a tangle of embarrassment and guilt and frustration there now, tied up into that grey, endless wearing-away that had bled into the memory-space between them and which Ren found _horrific_ in its implacability. The cough _had_ been just annoying at first, when everyone else had been ill as well, and Hux had not wanted to use up the medical droids' limited time and pharmacological stock with what was nothing more than a cold, something that would go away on its own; and then it hadn't quite gone away on its own, and he'd resolutely ignored it; and then it hadn't gone away for much too long, and then seeking help had gone from an embarrassing concept to a flat-out _admission_ of failure. Hux was not good with those. 

He would have borne it alone, and kept going -- Ren suspected he would never have stopped, until his body stopped _for_ him, and was profoundly grateful all at once that this would not be necessary. It was over. Hux had said so, and so it was.

"It's important now," Ren told him, firmly. "I am not about to watch you cough yourself into misery whenever we try to have a conversation. Summon a droid; droids are discreet." 

Hux paused, like he was considering the idea, weighing all the reasons that such a course of action was impossible -- and then he leaned his head against Ren's shoulder, and with a tone of profound, surprised relief, said "Yes," said "I will."

Ren had never seen him so open, so acquiescing. Under other circumstances, he might have found the complete and uncharacteristic lack of protest alarming -- but currently he was _satisfied_ with it, with the small and certain knowledge that at least he was going to fix this one thing; even if everything _was_ going to go wrong, he would have made sure that Hux would not remain in pain. 

(It was the first thing he remembered about the two of them together: how, for some unfathomable and gracious reason, Hux had asked Ren to fix him, back on the Finalizer in the aftermath of the worst failure of both of their lives. That moment after Starkiller: _fix me. I seem to need it._

Ren was still saying yes.)

The droid, when it arrived, was brisk at least, and did not provide the same sort of lectures that the ones on the _Dark Heart_ were prone to: perhaps this was a result of being glared at by Kylo Ren the entire time it had the temerity to be in the same room as him and Hux. Its evaluation partially upheld Hux’s own assertion that he wasn’t _ill_ : there was no major infection present that needed to be knocked out. But when the droid began using words like _sequelae_ and discussing various regimens of antitussive medication, it became clear to Ren that Hux had simply stopped listening -- was refusing to uncurl his fingers from around Ren's hand, droid or no droid, and letting Ren handle this. Handle it _all_. 

He didn't think anyone had ever trusted him this much. If he considered it too closely it would be overwhelming.

The droid concluded with _and rest for at least four shifts if you can be spared_ , which was entirely enough for Ren. He suspected he could manage to keep Hux pinned down here in the sanctuary of his quarters for the thirty-two hours that four shifts represented, and he would be glad to. He told the droid that all of this was acceptable, thanks; instructed it to have the various medications sent to them; and then threatened it quite gently: _tell no one about this, it is the General's business and mine_.

Once it had retreated, he squeezed Hux's hand, holding on as tightly as he could. Sometimes he could still feel the places inside Hux's fingers that he had broken and unbroken, an echo across months. "There," he said, wryly. "It'll be at _least_ thirty-two hours before the entire First Order descends on us because I decided I was an operatic hero, so you might as well rest."

Hux looked up at him with eyes that were entirely too large in his thin face, and _smiled_.

It wasn’t the best of all possible smiles, but it was the first real smile Hux had produced since he had been sent away, and it lit up his face like a small and personal dawn. "You are," he said. "I refuse to be an operatic heroine, though, because they tend to meet such uninspired and avoidable ends."

He still sounded terrible, but there was a warmth in his voice that had not been there before.

Ren found that he was _blushing_ , heat spreading in a red flush across his cheeks. Having Hux smile at him like that was, he decided, quite unbelievable; it was not an expression he thought he could get used to, but he wanted to try.

"Executed for treason is at least not _boring_ ," he said, still bone-dry and rueful. "I don't know how to ask you to forgive me, when I'm this happy to be here, but I -- shouldn't have. I got it into my head and I couldn't not do it, but we had a _plan_."

Hux tugged on his hand: _come here, I want to hold you and be held, it's medically necessary._ Aloud he said, "Nobody is going to get executed for treason. Yes, we had a plan. We had a clever and theoretically workable plan that was more or less going as expected, except for the part where I apparently _can't bear it_ when you're being sent all around the galaxy and being shot at, which I had not initially taken into consideration." His cough threatened an encore performance, and he appeared to decide that talking with his actual voice right now was not a sensible tactic, and continued silently once more: _And now we'll have a new plan._

Ren went to him with an ease which even he found remarkable; Hux was the only person who he was so willing to obey, especially if it meant that he ended up with his arms looped around Hux's shoulders, their thighs pressed together where they sat on the edge of the bed.

_I still should have -- consulted you. Before I broke it,_ Ren said. _I'm afraid I'm no good at following orders._

Hux thunked his forehead against Ren's shoulder and held him tight, amusement and exasperation in equal measures coloring his mindtouch. _Yes, of course you should have consulted me, and you are absolutely_ dreadful _at following orders, and in other news water is wet,_ he said. _I love you. And I'll think of something: I always think of something, it's my job, it's what I'm for._

The coppery strands of Hux's hair were silk under Ren's fingers when he lifted his hand to cup the back of Hux's neck, holding him exactly where he was. It was a profound relief to have Hux _take charge_ of this mess; he shouldn't have to, it was all Ren's fault (again), but he _would_ and Ren could -- allow him. Hux was like the mechanics of celestial navigation: far too complex, implacable, sneaky when Ren least expected it. He sighed, leaned against him. 

_I love you too. Think quickly. I doubt we have much time._


	4. Chapter 4

Hux, thinking: a vertical line drawn between his eyebrows, eyes shut, the translucent skin of his eyelids a delicate tracery of blue veins. Holding onto him was like cradling a thrumming complex machine. Jewelled metal and clear sweet oil, a smooth working action and a multitude of interlocking gears, halfway between an engine and an astrolabe – and accelerating.

_Think quickly,_ Ren had said, and Hux had set about doing so with a practiced determination.

It was remarkable to watch. Ren kept quiet, like a man at the theater, and observed from a distance: the vaulted room of Hux's mind coloring over with evaluation, analysis, sequencing. Options taken up, rotated, discarded – replaced. This was a mind that _liked_ reading policy reports, that saw consequence approaching from far off, and compensated.

With a new, _impersonal_ delight, Ren realized that Hux was going to be a _good_ Emperor. Not just because he was _Hux_ , and wanted – for whatever inexplicable reasons he wanted – to render order out of chaos, to remove inefficiency and misuse of resources … to keep Ren himself from being hurt, which was a motivation that surely shouldn't equal the other two, in Ren's own opinion – but because what Hux _was_ was suited to the job.

The hollows under his closed eyes were so dark they had gone past grey into bruise-blue. Shadows, over the fine-drawn prominent arcs of his cheekbones. Ren ached to see him so attenuated, even as he knew it could have been so much worse. Hux could have been actually ill, ill like he'd been on Felthor what felt like a lifetime ago: the kind of sickness that could kill. This had not been like that, though it had been quite bad -- and bad in ways Ren was not sure he understood: _why_ had Hux waited so long to see the medical droids? Especially when they had such simple, if annoying, solutions – antitussive medications in little gold pills, a hideous red syrup to drink, but all of it meant only to stop the cycle of irritation in his lungs and throat. There was no illness to _cure_ , only – overwork, misery, that terrible grey endlessness that was conspicuous now by its _absence_ in Hux's working mind.

What _was_ there – like a shimmer of color, white to orange to blue, a halo at the edges of the lovely machinery of _Hux fixing the problem_ \-- was a sort of oilslick iridescence. A flame that had impinged on metal left this sort of tempered color behind: the memory of fire. Ren thought _heat like a weight_ , remembered the terrible stretched-out endlessness of being trapped in the Force-vision of a desert, white-blue ashes and salt, recalled all in a cascade: dreaming the bright half of the Janus crown on Hux's head. A creature all of light. Unfeeling, perfected. Monstrous.

There were traces of it. Or – traces of something which was like it, the Force radiation of the bright crown like the spit-slick leavings of a tongue. A tongue made of light, of _flame_ , etching shapes over whatever it touched, burning new patterns into the texture of Hux's mind. How could Ren have left him alone with a Force artifact that emitted this much _alteration_? Hux should never have had to deal with it, he never should have been near it, and this was – like everything else – all Ren's fault, all of it. Force artifacts were his business. He should have taken both of the pieces with him, no matter what the Supreme Leader would have done to him if he'd found out that the bright half was found –

Hux's eyes snapped open, and his mouth curved in a slight, satisfied smile. He unclasped his hands from where they had been resting on his chest, lifting a finger. 

"I need to die," he said, still rasping, but in a bright and conversational tone.

_"What?"_

"Or get captured. But dead is better." Hux sat up, working his neck and shoulders with a wince. "Let's go with dead."

"You are going to have to explain that further," said Ren. "And also not do it, you're not _allowed_ to be dead."

Hux blinked at him, and Ren realized that he must look – miserable, stricken. Confused, certainly. He _was_ confused, and still caught up in noticing those flametongue temper-marks in Hux's mind and here he was saying that _he needed to be dead_ , and there were very good reasons Ren had taken to wearing a full-face mask, and one of them was that he never could keep emotion out of his expressions, not even a little. 

"What? No. Not _really_ dead," Hux said. He still sounded fairly dreadful but he had somehow in the past twenty minutes reacquired some indefinable quality of _Huxness_ ; he seemed more _himself_. "Look. Here's how it's going to go. The reason you took the _Dark Heart_ and came out here was because you had a warning, or a premonition or something, that danger threatened. Our entire defense force is out busily fighting off imaginary pirates. The station is without any ship-to-ship defenses whatsoever."

Ren watched him – watched the animation with which he explained the plan, all of that machinery inside his mind at work, full-speed, in harmony with the darting sketches of his hands in the air. Perhaps it was going to be all right. Perhaps the temper-marks wouldn't _matter_ after all –

"At which point," Hux went on, " _an attack takes place_. A significant attack. Led by the forces of Luke Skywalker."

Actually, no. No, this was not going to be fine. "I," Ren said, interrupting, "I – it's really not a very good idea – even if we actually knew where Skywalker _is,_ you don't want to call that down on us, Hux."

"Too late; I've already set it in motion," Hux said impatiently. "Ages ago now. I had a fake message sent, purporting to be from somewhere across the Rim, reporting attacks by Skywalker's forces. Ran it through all the levels of encoding and scrambling and put a lot of noise and signal fluctuation under the voice channel. It got Snoke's attention, apparently: he ordered me to keep an eye out for further messages referring to Skywalker and report them to him, security level eighteen. The groundwork's in place for a fake attack. Which will be carried out by the _Dark Heart_ 's people in clever disguise, the station will be damaged, mayhem and destruction, and in the middle of all the confusion _I_ get killed and a number of others get captured."

It took Ren a moment, but as Hux kept talking, he _got_ it – the neat subterfuge of the thing, the assembled solution. How it didn't involve the actual Skywalker at all, but the fear of him, the facsimile, Snoke's obsessive fixation brought to life as a shadow-puppet. It was stunningly elegant. Slowly, he began to smile. "Which means you're free of this place," he said. "You're _dead,_ so clearly you are no longer here. And no one will expect _you,_ the deceased General Hux, to be leading our revolt."

"Precisely. I and the other victims will be spirited away not to the hereafter but to our actual base of operations, which I have yet to see but which Phasma will have prepared. _You_ , meanwhile, have the extremely unenviable task of reporting all this to Supreme Leader Snoke. You were involved in the firefight and have been wounded, and your shuttle damaged, but you will inform Snoke that you are in pursuit of the attackers." Hux coughed. "After which you will join us. I think that covers most of the immediate difficulties."

It did. Except – the idea of lying so directly to Snoke was a complicated one. Ren had elided, and disguised, and carried treason in his heart like a coal, but he hadn't yet _lied,_ blatant falsehood. He was abruptly thankful that he would only have to do it over the comm, and not in person. It is too easy to imagine what _in person_ would feel like. The slow unseaming.

He must still be showing every emotional flicker on his face, or else hadn't put up enough mental shields between them (didn't, if he was being honest, strictly _want_ to do so), because Hux looked quite apologetic and said, "It's far enough away that he can't do the mindpeel thing. Or he wasn't doing it to me, at any rate. And your signal can cut out because of the damage to your ship, you won't have to be on his screen for very long."

"It's fine. He doesn't have that much range. I don't think. And I can manage it if he does." He _would_ manage, somehow. Ren reached out and captured Hux's hand; laced their fingers together. Changed the subject.

"How do you do that?" he asked. "Come up with solutions."

Hux's fingers were thin, strong; they tightened around his. "It's just...what seems most likely to achieve the desired result, given the current situation. I don't know; it just happens."

"It's remarkable. Will the rest of the station agree to it? Do they – know? They must, if you've been laying the groundwork for this long..."

"...Oh, _hells_ ," said Hux, and squeezed his eyes shut, pinched the bridge of his nose. "I'm an idiot. They're probably picturing...I don't actually want to know what they're picturing, come to think of it. You gave the entire command center a collective heart attack just _appearing_ like that, it's been – what, _hours_ and I haven't let anybody know they can stand down yet."

He got off the bed, going to collect his datapad. "I don't think hearing my voice would be very reassuring just at the moment."

The station, when Ren had arrived on it, had _scattered_ before him and he had not in the slightest cared; he had hardly noticed. But now he remembered some other faces than Hux's own -- how white they had been, how frozen. In the trembling heart of Ren's anticipation and fear, their horror had been satisfying, but hearing Hux's concern for them, he found that he regretted it. A little. They were Hux's people, after all.

They were his people, too, weren't they.

"I'm sorry," Ren said. "I didn't think about it. I really didn't think of much of anything but you."

Hux sat back down beside him and leaned over to kiss his cheek. "I am going to be flattered by that," he said, typing rapidly on the datapad, his fingers moving over the glass with deftness, certainty. Ren watched over his shoulder. It wasn't an eloquent message, nor terribly detailed, but it seemed to convey the key points: Hux was quite all right, Lord Ren was _code nineteen_ , and all officers and crew should go about their duties as usual. 

"There," Hux said, and set the datapad aside. "I imagine I'll have to do a little explaining, but that ought to keep them from battering the door down to rescue me from your clutches. I do not wish to be rescued."

Ren reached for him – slipped a hand behind his neck, tangled his fingertips in the copper strands of his hair where they fell at his nape. "You don't get to be rescued. Not for another –" He checked the discarded datapad's chrono. "…twenty-six hours."

When he kissed him, Hux shivered all over, once, and then melted against him, leaning in, kissing back with a sharp hunger. One of his hands sank into Ren's hair, the other spread against his back, possessive, determined.

Twenty-six hours would not be long enough, Ren thought, and gave himself up entirely.

#

In the mess, the rumor got around that Second Lieutenant Abeline had actually been on the bridge when Lord Ren had arrived, a stormcloud on legs, and she had acquired a small host of gossipmongers before she even managed to sit down with her vat-steak and carefully rationed soda. She rolled her eyes at them. In the short time since the General had sent around that announcement, _Lord Ren is code nineteen,_ the entire station had gone from nailbiting tension to a sort of nervous giddiness: Snoke's very own enforcer, the nightmare scourge of the _Finalizer_ , was on _their_ side? 

"Of course I was concerned," Abeline said. She was telling the story for the fourth time, and she'd gotten it down to a science. "But General Hux handled it – just walked right up to him like he'd never been scared a day in his life. I think he _was_ , you know, there wasn't a bit of color in his face, but he just marched them both off the bridge and we all stood there like we couldn't quite believe it."

"And then they disappear for almost five shifts," said Trooper SV-3271, who was rather stuck on this part, "and has anyone seen them farther than two feet apart since?"

"Not me." Abeline shrugged, and carved off a large forkful of vat-steak. She hadn't actually seen them much at all – the one time, walking down the corridor. They'd looked like there was some kind of magnet between them, pulling them together, their shoulders almost brushing.

"What in all space could they have been doing for that long," SV-3271 asked the room at large, chin propped on her fists, elbows on the mess table.

There was a brief silence. Someone – probably Technician Delik, who had _ideas_ \-- snickered.

"Whatever it was," said Abeline, who was pretty sure she knew what they'd been doing and was far too polite to confirm it to _troopers_ , "the General suborned him in less time than it took us to finish putting up the last of the antenna arrays, so I'm satisfied."

"Well," Trooper QX-4556 spoke up, "who wouldn't throw over the Supreme Leader if the General kissed him?"

The entire table turned to stare at him. QX-4556 went red to the ears. "I mean," he said. "It's. I would. Wouldn't you?"

Gleefully, Delik said, "Someone has spent way too much time thinking about the General."

"We are never letting you live this down," added SV-3271.

QX-4556 put his face in his hands. "Can't we talk about the new orders instead," he said. "Please."  


  


#

  


One of the drawbacks of superluminal travel was the lag time in _communication connectivity_. 

Transmission and reception were _possible_ in hyperspace, between ships traveling as part of a group; beyond that, things got all relative, and a signal sent from normal space to a ship in hyperspace took a while to catch up with it, and a reply _from_ the traveling ship was almost impossible until it went subluminal again.

Phasma knew all this, knew how it worked, but that did not make the waiting any easier. 

In the pause between the last two sections of the jump sequence her comm had lit up with the station’s frequency, scrambled and encoded for her eyes only. She had just had time to run it through her ship computer’s decoding algorithm and listen to what it said before Khataj’s astrogator was counting them down again for the final jump, and she had spent the time in the flickering void of hyperspace going over sequentially more and more alarming interpretations of the message. _Lord Ren has arrived on the station, unanticipated and unannounced,_ the comm officer had said, sounding frankly horrified. _The General has -- left to speak privately with him. No one knows why he is here, and it has been hours. Request reply and any advice._

Ren wasn’t supposed to be anywhere _near_ the damn station, Phasma thought, watching the blue-white dazzle through her viewports, not seeing it. Ren was supposed to be playing nice with Snoke on the other side of the galaxy, what the hell was he doing _there_ , and -- of course, no one but she and Hux knew he was actually on their _side_ , the entire station’s crew must be desperately afraid Snoke had found out --

She made herself take deep measured breaths, and when the countdown came to drop back out of hyperspace her hands were steady on the controls. The formless swirl of light resolved itself into lines that shrank into stars, and she and Khataj’s group were hanging in clear space near a cloud-swirled planet glowing with green and blue. A little distance away she could see the familiar angular shape of old-fashioned Star Destroyers. _The Tarkin fleet_ , she thought. 

“Captain,” said Khataj over the comm. “Join me on the _Hand_ for the rendezvous.”

It wasn’t exactly an order, but it tasted just like one. Phasma closed her eyes inside the helmet. “Very well,” she said. “Give me a few minutes.”

“As you wish. We have time.”

_That’s what you think_ , Phasma thought, and closed the channel -- and opened another one. To the station, priority alpha, code nineteen. 

It took a few moments to get there, and a few more moments for her codes to be registered and unscrambled -- long enough for Phasma to wonder if perhaps everything was already over, if everything had _really_ gone wrong -- and then the familiar voice of one of Hux’s lieutenants came over her speakers. “Captain, sir?”

“Status report,” Phasma snapped. “I only just received your message before the last jump, and had no time to reply.”

“Oh. _Oh_ ,” said the lieutenant. “Sorry, sir. Yes. It...uh. Status is nineteen, sir. All clear.”

“I need to speak to the General,” she said, not quite allowing herself to relax. Ren’s arrival on the station meant that _something_ had gone wrong, that the plan they’d worked on and upheld for eight grueling godsdamn months was no longer in play, and before Phasma did any talking to Tarkins or crimelords she needed to know what was going on. 

“Yes, sir. One moment, sir.”

There was the click of a channel being switched, and a pause, and the series of faint tones that meant it was being fed through one of the Tarkin cipher algorithms -- and then Hux came on the line, sounding -- rather better than she had heard him for some time. “Phasma,” he said. “Where are you?”

“At the rendezvous point. What’s going on? I got a message that Ren suddenly appeared on the station --”

“Yes,” he said, “the, ah. The plan has changed.”

“What happened? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” He actually sounded something close to it: he hadn’t coughed once, and some of the awful exhausted rasping was gone from his voice -- and he sounded somehow indefinably _warmer_ , too. “The adjustment was unexpected, but I think the new plan will work quite nicely, and it fills in some uncertain areas of the original strategy.”

“Tell me, fast,” she said. “I’m about to join Khataj to meet up with the Tarkins.”

Hux did. It was, Phasma realized quite quickly, going to work: it was not only _neat_ , but simple and extremely effective, and it did in fact cover a couple of difficult and hitherto unanswered questions. She listened intently and asked for clarification where necessary, and then sat back in the chair, taking the helmet off, and ran her hands through her hair. 

“Okay,” she said. “Got it. What about _you_ , though? Are you up to this?”

From anyone else it would have been a killing insult. “Yes,” Hux said, ruefully, after a moment. “Yes, I am. I’m all right, Phasma. I mean it.”

“You sound better,” she said. 

“Yes, well.” He didn’t have to say it: both of them knew the improvement could be unilaterally blamed on Kylo Ren. “Report back to me once the rendezvous is complete and you’re safely planetside. I want to know the details.”

~

From the bridge of the _Gripping Hand_ the Tarkin fleet looked a great deal less impressive than Phasma had hoped it might. The ships were inescapably both small and old compared with the First Order’s cutting-edge fleet manifests, and there were so few of them -- but as Khataj’s crew took them in a little closer, Phasma could make out the unmistakable shapes of modern weapon emplacements, defensive shield generators, hull armor upgrades. From a distance they still looked obsolete. Maybe even obsolete enough to suggest they weren’t worth spending firepower to blow up. 

A tiny smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as she noticed more and more little details. The Tarkin flagship was an old _Victory-II_ Star Destroyer, half the size of the later _Imperial-II_ SDs which themselves were half the size of the _Resurgent_ -class SSD, but as the _Hand_ came in closer she could see the _Victory-II_ standard-issue Hoersch-Kessel drive units had been replaced with KDY Destroyer-1 ion powerplants, the ship’s aft section heavily modified to accommodate the larger engines. With its smaller mass compared to the ImpStar Deuce, the engine upgrade meant that this particular ship was quite a _lot_ faster. There were also maneuvering thrusters in arrays on either side of the ship’s bow, meaning it could probably turn in something close to its own length. 

_Sometimes_ , Phasma thought, still smiling inside the helmet, _sometimes private funding has its advantages._

The other Tarkin ships were less heavily modified, but all of them had been upgraded, and all of them bristled nastily with weapons. And the mercenaries she was bringing to this party would make sure that all of them were commanded by people who knew what they were doing, and had the primal eldest motivation to succeed: winning this meant getting paid. 

She watched as the ships grew bigger in the viewport, and was aware of Eres Khataj coming up to join her. The crystals braided into Khataj’s hair chimed softly as she moved. 

“An inspiring sight, Captain,” she said, and it would have taken a mind-reader to determine precisely what it was she meant; but Phasma thought -- right now -- that she did not have to try.  


  


#

  


Juliana Tarkin let her cousin do the introductions; it made him feel like he was in control, and keeping Cyril from noticing that all of his control was symbolic was how a person could stand to live with Cyril. She'd honed that particular skill in twenty or so years of slow exile on Eriadu, watching and waiting and biding her time, feeling the galaxy slip on by – she'd been seven, when she'd come to live with Lady Tarkin and her last-surviving child, and even at seven she'd _dealt_ with Cyril. 

Children in the garden, playing at decay, reenacting little bits of history. A toy blaster, a child-size Grand Moff uniform. Dreaming, like children do. Juliana often wondered how Cyril remembered their childhood: had it curdled, for him? Had the games gone all to dust, when he realized how far an empire really could fall? They had for her. Perhaps Cyril was still playing them now, with much larger toys.

But they had both flown such a long way from those colonnades, to be waiting on the ship Cyril had optimistically and grandiloquently renamed _The Hope of Eriadu_ (Juliana could not take this seriously, not in the privacy of her own mind) for General Hux's hired mercenaries.

A matched set, bookends of a most unusual shelf: Captain Phasma, as implacable as reported, a-gleam in silver from crown to boot, and Nova's own fearsome Eres Khataj, broad-hipped, broad-shouldered, _blue,_ the long fall of her braided hair glittering. They came off of their shuttle and Cyril stood his ground (good boy) until they'd walked right up to him. There were handshakes all around. Cyril launched majestically into a description of their fleet, and Juliana caught the sidelong glance between Phasma and Khataj as clear as day: they'd already figured out most of what they were now being told, but were willing to play along.

Juliana hung back; Cyril would wheel their new friends around to her eventually, and think it a concession to introduce her, and then she'd have plenty of time. Besides, from the top of the bridge she could watch Khataj case the joint, to use the parlance she was sure the Chiss was most familiar with, and observe Phasma evaluating Cyril for command suitability.

Phasma asked interesting questions about the upgrades Juliana had so painstakingly spent all of their money on. She was smart. That was … unexpected, and shouldn't have been. Juliana noted her own bias: First Order troopers were all overtrained hyper-loyal imbeciles. _Fix it, Juliana; you know better._

Think about it again: Juliana could understand Phasma in the context of her one meeting with General Hux. This was the sort of person that ambitious sprung-steel coil of a man would trust. A trooper's trooper, creative exactly to the edges of what loyalty would permit and not a millimeter further. Loyal to her General, not to her service. An elegant weapon. (An unusable weapon in anyone's hands but General Hux's. Ah well – they had committed, General – Emperor – Hux was what they were going to get.)

Phasma made more sense than Kylo Ren: Kylo Ren, who Juliana sometimes dreamed of, a black curve like a sketchmark against a starlit sky, holding a glass of useless champagne. She couldn't figure out if she _pitied_ him or if she was _afraid_ of him, and that uncertainty was giving her all sorts of problems in understanding why he'd thrown over his master for Hux's sake. Ambition didn't jibe with his inability to deal with a party. Perhaps he'd had mystic visions of the future that told him what to do.

It was _not_ her problem. They were coming up to her now, her cousin and the two newcomers, and they were the pieces on the gameboard that she could see, and touch, and smile at.

"And this is my cousin, the Honorable Juliana Tarkin," said Cyril.

"Pleased to meet you," said Phasma.

"A pleasure," Khataj said, and when Juliana held out her hand, the Chiss bent over it, pretty as any courtier, and kissed the back. Her lips were dry, and the azure shade of them was _not_ cosmetics.

Juliana was grinning by the time Khataj straightened up: the real smile, the one that sharpened her face to knives and wasn't actually that attractive. "The title's hardly necessary," she said. "Think of me as your financial and political consultant. I'm the money; Cyril's the one who'll be doing the shooting. Would you like to come down and see Frey's Hope?"

One visible smile (Khataj) – one smile she'd bet on, however disguised by a silver helmet (Phasma) – and one look of mild dismay (Cyril.)

An _excellent_ beginning.  


  


#

  


“I told you, he had it all under control,” said QX-4556, thumping the synthcaf dispenser absently; it gave a reluctant gurgle before filling the cup he held. “The whole time. And he’s _better_ now.” 

“Finally,” SV-3271 said, as they moved to a table. “That went on for what, _months_ , and as soon as Lord Ren shows up, suddenly he quits trying to hack up a lung every fifteen minutes?”

Technician Delik was already almost done with his ration bar when they sat down, and gestured with the wrapper. “Force healing,” he said. “Gotta be. Or maybe that’s just, you know, a side effect. Of their close friendship.” 

SV-3271 snickered, glancing over at her fellow trooper, who was blushing. “Devoted friendship.”

“Well, _anyway_ ,” said QX-4556 with the air of one manually steering the conversation down another track, “he’s got everything sorted. Like I said he would. Even if he had to come up with a new plan in...not all that much time. It’s going to work.”

“Of course it is.” Abeline joined them. “His plans _do_ work. Delik, were you on duty that time the crane on the north mast broke down in the middle of trying to install an array?”

“Yeah,” he said, flattening the ration-bar wrapper and beginning to roll it into a crinkly silver cylinder. “We were gonna have to send for a new part, or fab one ourselves, which’d take almost as long, and set back the install almost a week. You’ll like this story, 4556, we’re all trying to troubleshoot the problem and it’s just obvious the thing is completely fucked, and here comes the General to have a look himself.”

“I was on comms,” Abeline said, “I didn’t get to see but I heard most of it.”

“He just examines the broken part, even though it’s covered in grease, and he doesn’t say anything and we’re all kind of wondering what the hell, and then he hands it back to the toolpusher and asks a bunch of questions one after the other. Only it takes a while, cause of his cough. Toolpusher looks puzzled, which, okay, me too, honestly, and tells Hux the answers -- most of it’s like _do you have a spare AE-35 unit and thirty feet of titanium cable_ , real weird shit.”

QX-4556 was listening, rapt, chin in his hands, and beside him SV-3271 glanced over and snickered again.

“So okay, he has his answers, and then he tells someone to get him something to draw on and with, and we’re all kind of wondering if he’s finally gone --” Delik twirled a finger by his ear, _loopy_. “But when one of us comes back with a piece of flimsiplast and a stylus he sketches out this temporary replacement piece, and we can all see how it works, how we can build it out of what we’ve got already in hand. He tells us it won’t hold more than seventy-five percent rated load, and not for more than a week, but that’s enough for us to keep working while we either order or fab the real thing.”

Abeline had to smile at their expressions. “So yes, I think you can say his plans tend to work. Even if this one is going to be hard to pull off, it’ll work. We’ll _do_ this.”

QX-4556 was looking faintly dreamy, and his colleague elbowed him in the ribs. “Wake up,” she said. “Next shift starts in five minutes, and you don’t want to be late to work, it’d disappoint the General, and then he’ll _never_ end up kissing you.”

He groaned. “You are never, ever, ever gonna let that go, are you?”

“Nope,” said SV-3271 with a grin.  


  


#

  


For the past four hours, they'd been holding the council of war at a picnic table in Anson Balardine's back garden, next to the gazebo. There were finger-sandwiches – constantly renewed by the Balardine servants – and a seemingly-endless supply of light rosé, and sunlight pouring down onto the Balardine peach trees, just coming into fruit. The wind made the crystals in Khataj's hair chime continuously, and she had become progressively more annoyed. Phasma was getting better at figuring out when she was actually annoyed, rather than being smug and secretive. Real annoyance made her snappish. 

They'd come around to the minutiae of the command structure, and there they had stuck, like a groundcrawler on a muddy planet.

"Of course I'll be on the _Hope of Eriadu,_ " Cyril was saying to Khataj, either oblivious to her expression or so consumed with bravado that he wasn't paying any mind, "so your _Gripping Hand_ can have second position, of course."

Every time Cyril said _Hope of Eriadu_ , Balardine, whose planet was Frey's Hope and had been long before the Tarkin fleet had even ventured into this sector of the galaxy, winced. When Balardine winced, Juliana, seated next to him in a confection of seafoam gauze, looking fragile and pointy and not half as dangerous as Phasma knew she was, smiled wider.

It had already been a long meeting. This was not Phasma's rubric. This – negotiation, politics, making sure everyone got what they wanted, or a facsimile thereof – was Hux's job; she was a soldier. A tactician, and not bad at it, but not the sort of person who could gnaw on cold cucumber slices and carve up authority for fun.

Phasma dealt with it by imagining what she'd say to Hux, when she reported in next: _Balardine's a decent man, runs his planet well and efficiently, doesn't much like any of this but likes the First Order less -- did they tell you he lost a son, a First Order TIE pilot, several years back -- and has made his decisions accordingly. And Juliana? Juliana's a shark. But you knew that already, didn't you._

"When," asked the shark, cutting her cousin neatly off at the pass and turning that pale-eyed gaze on Phasma instead, "do you expect General Hux to be joining us?"

"Within the next fortnight," Phasma said. It wouldn't be longer than that – unless Snoke and the Order were more on the ball than any of them had planned for. Either Hux would make it to Frey's Hope before the peaches on all the Balardine trees were ripe, or he wouldn't make it here at all.

"So soon," Juliana said. "And without us having built him a palace yet."

Balardine turned to her, said, "The General is entirely welcome to stay in any of my houses, as he would prefer, or in the Planetary Governor's residence in the capital. You know that, Juliana."

"I would never disparage your hospitality, Anson."

"The Governor's residence will be fine," said Phasma. "Let's leave palaces out of it."

"Until after our war," Juliana said. That smile was unnerving.

Phasma could handle it. She smiled right back, with teeth. "There'll be plenty to decide after the war."  


  


#

  


Once he had settled on what was to be done, preparations went ahead very quickly. They didn’t have a lot of time before Ren’s flight was traced and investigated. 

Hux had always worked best under pressure. Under intense pressure. They were all in considerable danger and there was a chance this would _not_ work after all, but he thought the probability of that was fairly low. Acceptably low. He could, in fact, think straight: the droid’s drugs had dealt with his cough astonishingly quickly, and with a good deal of the somatic misery excised from the situation Hux was able to _function_ on a more efficient level. 

(The drugs, and Ren. With Ren there, he was _better_. He thought that perhaps this was a permanent development; that he would never again be able to function properly _without_ Ren, and the thought held surprisingly little concern.)

He found that he minded the prospect of damaging the station more than expected. He held no love for the station itself, nor for the grinding work and time and effort that had gone into its construction: but it was a thing he had caused to be made, a thing that functioned according to its purpose, and deliberately sabotaging his own work tugged at Hux’s nerves rather harder than he had anticipated. It needed to be done; it would be done; he would do it. But he abhorred wasted effort. 

This was not a tiny Starkiller, he told himself. That had been failure beyond his control, a cascade of destruction triggered by factors larger than his capacity to manage. The station would not be _destroyed_ , merely damaged, and could be repaired; no one would be badly hurt, certainly no one would be lost. Still the thought of his people’s work and time gone to build what he now proposed to break -- 

_Get over it_ , he told himself. _One can always, etcetera. And this needs to be done right, because there will not be a second chance, so bloody well pay attention to what you’re doing._

~

Seen from the outside, the completed station bristled with white dishes along the lengths of both polar masts, clusters of them pointing in different directions, like barnacles on a piling. The central toroidal habitat-and-control-administration module gleamed dull silver in the light of the nearest system, spangled here and there with light. It looked like a child’s toy, perfect and miniaturized by distance, a thing not beautiful in itself but possessing the aesthetic force of an object performing its designed task, the odd but undeniable grace of _applied utility_. 

It hung in the blackness, completely still; any tiny motion was compensated for automatically by vernier thrusters, maintaining its position in space. Shuttles had been flying back and forth between the station and the black shape of the _Dark Heart_ with her running lights off, hanging not so very far away at all. Now the shuttles ceased, and the station and the ship waited. 

As before, preparing to send out his false signal warning of Skywalker’s attack, Hux felt the silence draw down all around him, spinning out into seconds that seemed clear and slow like drops of glass. He stood now where he had stood then, in central control, but when that familiar _click_ came in his head Hux spoke no words; he merely thumbed his personal comm, held in his closed hand, on and off. Once. 

He knew about time dilation, but even so it seemed to take much too long between the signal and the moment when the station first shuddered with close-range laser fire. All of them staggered, clutching at consoles as the floor shook. The lights flickered and went out, came back, went out again, replaced with the red emergency lighting, and the alarm klaxon began to bray. 

Hux had spent some time ensuring that the lights would fail almost at once, and found time inside the adrenaline rush to be pleased at the effect. He steadied himself as another volley of laser fire pounded the station, and snapped out orders, demanding to know what was firing at them and where it had come from, dispatching troopers to man their defensive gun emplacements -- laughable, in the face of the attacking firepower. 

“-- Sir, hull integrity in sector 7-G is down to eighty percent, the deflector shield generator has been destroyed --” the floor shook again -- “Correction, seventy-five percent integrity remaining --”

“-- Sir, upper quadrant beta gun emplacements have been destroyed --”

“-- Sir, sensors are damaged but report the attacking vessel ident registers as an old Alliance cruiser, heavily modified --”

“-- attacking vessel is approaching closer, appears to be maneuvering to hard-dock in 7-G --”

“Transmit emergency signal to headquarters,” he said grimly. “Report unprovoked attack by unknown vessel, possibly Alliance in origin. Tell them we have no defensive capability at this time, our TIEs are not available to engage the attacker, hull integrity is falling, we’re moving to shelters.” 

“...Yes, sir,” said his comms officer. There was, of course, no way the First Order could _respond_ in time, he had calculated how long it would take even for their fastest ships -- and they would not _be_ dispatching the fastest ships, not for this, not for Hux and his punishment detail. 

He smiled a little, to himself, just for a moment, and then got back to work, ordering all non-essential personnel to move to the farthest point of the station and split up into groups as they’d practiced over and over in breach drills. “There are enough refuge chambers for everyone,” he said over the alarm klaxon. “If they don’t mind close quarters. Can you get a hailing frequency open?”

“Negative, sir, they’re not responding --”

A blast rocked the station, and a new set of strident alarms began to howl as the hull-breach emergency protocol went into effect, slamming airtight doors closed to block off the breached section. Hux could feel the pressure change against his face, his eardrums. “What was that?”

“They’ve clamped on, sir, they have hard dock and they blew the hull. They’re...inside.”

“Give the order for our people to enter and seal the refuge chambers,” he said. “All of you, if you hurry you can make it to the chamber on Six Left. Go.”

“Sir -- what about you?”

“Never mind about me,” said Hux. “That’s an order.”

He was really very proud of them. In the red flickering glare of the emergency lighting all four of his command officers looked terribly, appallingly young, and yet determined. Another blast, and another, shook the floor beneath them: pressure bulkheads failing one by one under intense fire. “I said that’s an _order_ ,” Hux repeated. 

“With all due respect, sir, we’re not leaving.”

His chest was tight with something entirely unrelated to pathology. Hux thought that if this were real, if all of this were really happening, these young men and women would have given him the same answer. 

“...Very well,” he said, and drew his blaster. “I don’t know what these people want, or why they’ve chosen this way to get it, but let’s see if we can make it _hard_ to get.”

He was aware, in the back of his head, as he had been during this whole exercise, of Ren’s presence. It was Ren who had been directing the bombardment, of course. Hux trusted no one else to do it quite so well. He had kept a light block over the mindtouch, because he needed to concentrate entirely on his job, but now he let a flicker of pride and gratitude through: _thank you, we’re almost there, we’re almost done._

And then the blast doors to the command center slid open, and Hux knew perfectly well the internal security camera system was getting all of this on visual and infrared, every moment of it, as the invaders poured through the widening gap, blasters at the ready, and as the firefight began. 

In the eye of the camera the figures of Hux and his four officers, distorted by the fisheye lens, looking very small in the flaring, strobing scarlet light, raised their weapons. In the eye of the camera the six, seven, eight people on the other side -- in pale mismatched clothing and armor, all marked with what looked like the old Rebel Alliance’s symbol -- shot first. 

Shot first, and repeatedly. 

On the recording it was very clear. The leader of the Alliance crew aimed her blaster squarely at Hux’s chest, and fired four times, and all four found their mark. He was shoved violently backward, half-spun-around by the force of the bolts as he fell, and landed in a rather appallingly _small_ heap face-down on the tiles. Two of his officers fell almost at the same time; the third took several attackers out with him, and the last was apparently trying to reach the General when the final bolt struck. 

The Alliance leader snapped out an order, not quite clear on the audio track: something about _Commander Skywalker wants proof._

_What about the others?_

_Take them too._

She stood aside as her crew seized the bodies of Hux and his officers, dragging them away, and spat on the floor where Hux had fallen. The next thing she said came through crystal-clear: _That’s for the Hosnian system. You bastard._

At the door she paused, turned, as if considering something; and then drew her blaster again and aimed directly at the camera lens. The recording blanked out in sudden brilliant light, and then stopped altogether.


	5. Chapter 5

"Needs more blood," said Hux, critically, head tilted. "Down the side of the cheek, here."

He was standing with his arms folded, watching the preparations for Ren's performance. The breast of his tunic was scorched, and when he took it off, Ren knew there would be four black bruises on his chest from the close-range stun bolts they'd used to make the false-flag transmission. That didn't matter at the moment, but it hurt to think about anyway. Ren held very still under the hands of the technician who was applying the blood -- a mix of dye thickened with food-preparation starch, scrounged up out of the _Dark Heart'_ s mess. It trickled and dried tacky. In this way it was much like being covered with actual blood, sliding down the side of his face as if he had been struck on the side of his head. He imagined how the wound would feel: that pulpy, wincing headache.

He was going to have to imagine more than just the image of a head-wound -- he needed, somehow, to hold the entire scenario in his mind, as if it was _real_. As if he had really arrived to the repeater station for a too-late rescue, only to see Skywalker's alliance already there, already engaged in destruction. Ren called up a vision behind his eyes: walking into the station, as he had in truth, but through a firefight. Hux, _dead_ , or captured --

No, that wouldn't help. Snoke could read emotion off of his face as adroitly as he could scoop thoughts out of his mind. He could not think about Hux, dead.

Rage, instead: alliance forces, his _mother's people_ \-- better --

"There should be scorchmarks," he said. "If there is _this_ much blood."

"He's got a point," said Hux. "Someone hold a spoon over a flame or something, we need carbon-black."

There was a sort of awful excitement, almost exhilaration, still fizzing at the top of Hux's mind, as carelessly broadcast as any of his thoughts had ever been back on Starkiller: the sensation of _performance_ , as he'd felt it after gods knew how many rally speeches, of having been _on_ in front of an audience. He wasn't paying any attention to the pain of bruising across his chest, or the rising welt on one cheekbone where he had hit the floor after being shot -- and that effervescent excitement was letting him not think very hard about what it was he was asking of Ren himself just at the moment. _That_ lurked underneath his conscious mind like a shadow, and Ren could not look at it without wanting to reach out for him.

Later for that. Later for a lot of things.

There was some limited comfort in how Hux was still -- _being Hux_ about all of this, including the part where Ren was being decorated with food coloring and carbon, like he was a stage actor. Hux was in control of the entire operation -- Hux had _designed_ it, had told Ren what to do, had _wanted_ him to open fire on the station with the _Dark Heart_ 's weaponry. Each explosion, each flare of fire and outgassing atmosphere -- all of that had been what was _meant_ to happen, and Ren knew he was trying to remind himself of the fact because otherwise he would just _keep thinking about it_ , about that bombardment -- about how in a slightly different universe he would have _meant every strike_ , here on Snoke's command.

He said, "Do try to make this look miserably painful," and bared his teeth in a rictus smile, testing to see if the 'blood' would crack.

It didn't. Much.

Hux managed not to wince, but Ren suspected that one had gone home through all the still-buoyant excitement he was using as a mental insulator. He didn't apply the ersatz burns to Ren himself: _too near the mark, much too near_ , he was thinking, and as he stood back to let the technician do his work Ren slipped out of his mind like a withdrawing fog, apologetic.

"Good enough," Hux said, and stifled a cough. "This shouldn't take long."

It wouldn't take long. Whether it worked or not, it wouldn't take long: either he would manage to lie to the Supreme Leader, commit the last of his treason, and get away with it -- or Snoke would see through him, and he'd have not only committed treason, he'd have betrayed them all, by accident.

Ren got to his feet in a swirl of tattered black, brushing the troopers away from him like insects. "Get out of command," he said to them. "I will do this alone."

He would. He _had to_. He couldn't look at Hux straight-on right now; he'd break _character_.

Hux nodded. He followed the troopers out, rubbing at the scorchmarks on his chest. His mind had gone closed and secure and distant, locked like the box he kept the bright crown in. Ren watched him go, and wanted -- enormously, unhelpfully -- to reach out for him, follow him in mindtouch if not in body. To feel him _present_ and close and _with_ Ren --

The doors to command irised shut, and Ren turned to the console, and began to key in communication coordinates to Snoke's base.

He knew them by heart. He'd sent them so many times before, though not from this bridge, and never with such hesitancy between the moment where the coordinates were punched in and the moment when he pressed the last button for _send_. 

He had to look away while he was doing it: pretend it was some other hand which issued the command. If he didn't have a choice (if he was somehow absolved of this choice) it was easier. Easier to pull himself together, settle his cloak around his shoulders and imagine himself into being _himself_ , Lord Kylo Ren, a person to whom nothing of the past year had ever happened.

A person who felt farther away with each passing second, each heartbeat of distance from Hux reminding him how different he had become willing to be.

Snoke's face resolved onto the holoprojector, six feet high. Disembodied: all scars and twisted flesh, and the lidless eyes as large as Ren's head, mercilessly intent. "Report," he said. Even through the limited capabilities of the _Dark Heart'_ s sound system, his voice had a sibilant reverberation. Ren could feel it in his bones.

"Supreme Leader," he began. "I am in pursuit of Luke Skywalker and a squadron of rebels."

Some expression flickered across Snoke's enormous face: a covetousness. Ren was so profoundly grateful for the stage blood streaked across his cheeks. Any disguise he could muster against that hunger. (The only reason this would work at all would be that Snoke -- as far as Ren knew -- could not reach him through the Force from this distance.)

"There are no reports of rebel activity in your sector, Ren," Snoke said, consideringly. "What happened to you? And what are the coordinates of your pursuit?"

Once, hearing _what happened to you_ would have been a sweet comfort. Snoke _did_ care about him. (Perhaps he still did. It didn't matter, and Ren despised even the abortive ache of want behind his breastbone: to be _worried for._ Snoke had been the only one, for so _long_ \--)

He read off the coordinates he and Hux had agreed upon: a tangential path out from the comm station in the opposite direction from the path they were really on. And when Snoke battened on to those coordinates, knowing full well that they were so _very_ near Hux's comm station, Ren told the lie Hux had given him to tell: told it and told it entire, and in the moment of telling he meant it.

_I had a Force vision_ , he explained; spun it out in hallucinatory detail, exactly how Force visions usually were. He framed it in the desert of Ysil. _I was burning in the salt flat, and my uncle was there. I was burning and I saw his plans like the missing piece of a star-chart behind his eyes, and I came here to stop him._

"Tell me again," said Snoke, and Ren remembered so clearly how it had felt to be _peeled_ , the last time on Snoke's base. Remembered, and told it again. _I came here to stop him and it was too late but I will catch him and I will kill him_ \--

He did not mention Hux at all. 

_Yes, the ship is damaged, but it is whole enough for this, Supreme Leader --_

_Yes, I was wounded in the firefight but I saw Skywalker and I want him dead --_

He told it as if Hux was an afterthought; a forgotten piece of intelligence. Also, Supreme Leader, your General is dead. Not that this Ren would care about such a thing.

_We're going to lightspeed, Supreme Leader. Cutting communications now._

His hand was shaking as he reached for the console; and even after Snoke's face had wavered and vanished, the shaking didn't stop. He stared at his fingers as if they had somehow betrayed him, and tried to figure out how to get up and get off the bridge. It seemed insurmountably hard.

  


#

  


Hux had not quite understood just how difficult this part was going to be. He had watched countless people throw themselves into mortal danger on his command, over the years: the first time had been hard, the first thirty, fifty times had been hard, but one soon grew a mental callus over that particular pressure point. This was the first time someone he loved had gone into battle because Hux -- specifically Hux, not the war machine, not high command, but Hux himself -- had told them to. 

He had known it would be bad, and had locked down mental walls around the part of his mind that was linked to Ren's, for both their sakes: Ren could not afford distractions, and he could not quite bear to feel what it was Ren would experience. But oh, gods, it was not just bad, it was _terrible_ , not knowing, not being able to know, what was happening; what Snoke was doing to him, whether this would work, whether he had just damned everyone to a slightly different version of hell than the one they'd have otherwise been scheduled for.

_I deserve this_ , he thought, miserably, staring at the deck plating beneath his feet, leaning in the corridor outside the command bridge. _I deserve this: he has come all this way, and done so much, and now I have made him do what is probably one of the hardest things he has ever done._

Hux closed his eyes, trying not to be quite as tired as he was, and reached for the wandering edges of certainty. This would work. They would win. In the end, it might even have been worth it. 

He was not sure exactly how much time had passed when his awareness of the world _changed_ subtly: the shape of the electrical power passing through the ship, or possibly just the shape of the mental space he shared with Ren. He was still locked off from that section of his consciousness, but he could _feel_ the difference before a trooper approached him hesitantly: "Sir, the -- transmission has concluded."

"I know," said Hux, straightening up. "I need to debrief Lord Ren. The bridge stays clear until I give the order."

He knew, too, that the trooper was wondering just _how_ he'd known, and decided that -- like very many other things -- could wait. Instead he just pulled his coat tighter around his shoulders, tried to look like someone who was worth what he'd just asked Ren to do, and waved open the bridge doors with a single sharp gesture of one hand. 

Ren was sitting in the communications bank, very still. Hux could see him breathing: sharp vast snatched inhalations of breath, while he stared into the middle distance. Or the distance where a holo transmission might appear. He was very pale, white like snow and stars, save for spots of color high in his cheeks, and he did not turn to look at Hux at _all_.

_What have I done to him_ , Hux thought, in one ragged snatch of mental break, before slamming his control right down again. It did not matter -- it mattered completely -- it was not currently _of use_ to ask that question. Instead, he simply crossed the _Dark Heart_ 's worn deckplates in a sharp and urgent stalk, coming to rest by Ren's chair.

_Are you_ \-- it was an incredibly stupid question, even without the benefit of rote-habit speech. Hux passed a hand over his face and didn't bother repeating it out loud: no, Ren was not even close to all right, not even on visual flight rules. 

"I'm sorry," Ren said, quite out loud. "Really, I think that went as well as it could have gone. Snoke -- probably -- doesn't suspect a thing." His voice was jarring in the silence of the bridge, quite even, like he was giving a report to some bored third lieutenant trooper, very far away.

"What on all the moons of Radomah are you _sorry_ for," Hux said, almost angry, and shrugged out of his coat. "Thank you. Thank you for doing that, and _I'm_ damned sorry to have asked it of you, Ren." He draped the coat around Ren's shoulders, as he had done before in the dripping ruins of the bacta-tank module on the _Finalizer_ , in another life. 

Ren shuddered, and an indefinable tension slipped out of him; the weight of the coat was grounding, and he clutched at its lapels, looking up at Hux. His eyes were _black_ , deep pools that Hux might drown in if he wasn't careful. "Sorry that -- it doesn't matter," he said. "That shouldn't have been so _hard,_ that's all --"

"Of course it was hard," Hux said. "Of course it was." He leaned over, touched Ren's cheek, still tacky with the false evidence of battle. "Come with me. Let me clean this off, I can't bear seeing you hurt, even if it's not real."

He tipped his face into Hux's fingertips, a blind and seeking gesture. Nodded. "-- wherever you like," he said, and that easy acquiescence was a little frightening in and of itself. More than a little. 

Hux cupped his hand to Ren's cheek, bent to kiss his forehead, blood or no blood. Stood, offered his hands. He had reoccupied his old quarters on the ship: even if he'd been blind he could have led Ren there. Outside he gave orders to the troopers to maintain comm silence and proceed through the jump sequence that would lead them in a day and a half to the distant worldlet of Frey's Hope; and he took Ren to what still felt like home, despite everything. Sitting him down on the edge of the bunk, Hux began with careful and delicate fingers to remove the evidence of all this last extinction-burst of lies.

  


#

  


The forward officer's mess on Deck Thirty of the Finalizer was Mitaka's usual haunt. It had been since he had come aboard years ago, following General Hux over from a smaller, less impressive Star Destroyer into the floating city-state which had become a kind of home -- for Mitaka at least, but he'd often imagined the General had thought so too, before Starkiller and everything after. Officer's country was the top rear third of the ship, below the command decks, and the mess glowed black and cyan and chrome like everything else -- the low serene pulse of the ship functioning as it was meant to. 

General Nield hadn't fucked it up _that_ badly. All the running lights were still the right colors. Someone who hadn't been here as long as Mitaka had would never know anything had changed.

Thanisson sat down at his left elbow, with breakfast: a nutrient cake in the Egg Flavor that only he seemed to be willing to ingest, and a very large mug of black coffee. He looked paler than usual, like he hadn't slept, or had had an unpleasant shock, and Mitaka was gearing himself up to ask, in the fashion of an older officer worrying that the younger one would fall over unexpectedly or order people out an airlock, what had gone wrong with him, when Thanisson said,

"Turn on the holoscreen. There's news."

The First Order's internal propaganda network was very simple in design, and utilized as few people as possible. In this case there was not even a live shot of an announcement: the constant running background scroll of information was overlaid with a chyron in black and red. The letters scrolling from right to left were bright -- appallingly bright -- and entirely unmistakable. 

_REPORTS OF ATTACK BY APPARENT REBEL SYMPATHIZERS IN OUTER SECTOR 7-A-QQ RECEIVED … DAMAGE REPORTED TO COMMUNICATIONS RELAY STATION THETA 9-5-ii-2 … CASUALTY NUMBERS CURRENTLY 25, FATALITIES 4 …_

The chyron scrolled past twice before an actual person appeared on the screen. One of the intelligence division's spokespeople, in the black-on-black with one red cuff title that meant high-ranking service. She had her hair pulled sharply back into a neat laminated knot and held a datapad in her gloved hands, from which she looked up at the holo recorder. 

“Intelligence has just been received and confirmed that an as-yet-unidentified force claiming to be loyal to the old Rebel Alliance has perpetrated an attack on a First Order comm station in the Outer Rim,” she said, with no expression whatsoever. “Investigations are proceeding, but at the moment a number of casualties have been confirmed, including four fatalities so far. Lieutenants Shandor Qi, Bray, and Diallo, and --” now she looked back at the datapad, and up again at the blue eye of the recorder -- “General Hux. Further information will be reported at the discretion of the Intelligence Division. This message repeats.”

Mitaka watched it repeat.

He felt quite cold, and not sad so much as aware very much of the space between each of his own breaths, the standard every-day respiration going on without much effort, until one day it would stop. Be _over._ Ended, snuffed out, random chance and bad luck and the pulse pistol of a stranger far away --

A long time ago, when he'd been young enough to be out on patrol with a Third Lieutenant Hux, a narrow-shouldered boy no older than Thanisson looked now, Mitaka had come back from an ambush he should have died in. Because he'd followed Hux's orders, and the orders had been _right._ After that he'd followed him anywhere he'd lead. 

_But not into disgrace, Mitaka,_ he told himself, _not out into that sector where he died._

No. He was here, on the _Finalizer_ under General Nield, and the world only _looked_ the same. The cyan glow of the ship's lighting hummed in its soft undertone; TIE pilots and intelligence officers and maintenance crews moved in their appointed rounds, exactly as they had before. The great machine was too well-designed to falter. All the faltering was inside his own chest, behind Thanisson's stricken eyes. The First Order designed people almost as well as ships, but only almost.

People, even great ones, were so _fucking_ fragile.

He was _very_ cold, and he would like to be sick in some unobtrusive corner.

"You all right?" he asked Thanisson, instead. 

Duty on a ship like this one did not make for the most healthy and vital of complexions at the best of times, but Thanisson looked less pale than _bleached,_ all the color in his face drained away, even his lips a bloodless narrow line. “No,” he said. “I'm not. None of us are. This was supposed to be a -- a short-term assignment. Under Nield. And afterward _he'd_ be back.”

He looked at Mitaka with eyes like holes, wanting answers and just as obviously knowing there were none to give. 

"A lot of things are _supposed to be,_ " Mitaka said, wishing very much that he could not be having this conversation; not be in any way responsible for helping Thanisson and the rest of the petty officers pick themselves up and be resigned. General Hux was dead, and it made no difference whatsoever: without him the galaxy continued to wheel in its endless course, and they with it, whether or not they wanted to go on. The universe kept spinning. “You ought to know that by now,” he added. “Expectation does not dictate events. He told us that, years ago, when I was starting out: what _should_ be has little to do with what _is._ You...adjust the strategy to suit the situation as new factors come into play.”

“There isn't a strategy,” said Thanisson, bleak, looking down at his tray, pushing it aside. “There isn't anything, now.”

“That's enough, Petty Officer,” he said, more sharply than he had intended to. “You have a job to do, and you are going to do it, and -- if nothing else think of him, and what he would say if he saw you right now. Think of that.”

Thanisson sat up a little, his eyes still looking far too much like holes. “He deserved better,” he said. 

“He deserved _much_ better,” said Mitaka, and for a long terrible moment he had to hold on to the edge of the table as a wave of cold miserable nausea flooded through him, stinging his eyes with the unthinkable threat of tears. “He deserved it _all.”_

  


#

  


All arable worlds looked vaguely similar, this far out. All of them were largely green, with blue bits, swirled with cloud: delicate, precious little marbles hanging in the black expanse of space. 

Frey's Hope was small -- perhaps half again the size of Felthor -- and the neighboring Wolsje system was near enough for the _Dark Heart_ 's navicomp to complain about the gravitational complications it was having to calculate around. Hux stood on the bridge, watching his new base of operations grow smoothly larger in the viewports, blocking out the stars. 

He was feeling a little of the odd numbness he'd felt watching Starkiller die. Numbness and a sense somewhere of vast and terrible pain yet to come. With this little gambit he had started the war, whether or not anyone else knew it. With this little gambit he had thrown countless lives into the hazard, and for the first time in his career Hux had done so on his own, without following orders from a superior officer. This time it was going to be all his fault. 

The way Ren had looked after that transmission to Snoke was not even slightly acceptable. Ren was resting, had been asleep for hours now, and Hux was not about to wake him before it was absolutely necessary. They were far too deep in this now to turn back, even if there had been any way to do so, but Hux watched Frey's Hope approach with a vague kind of unresolved dread -- 

_No_ , he thought, _regret at this point will not keep atmo in and vacuum out; you have to do this thing because you have bought and paid for it, and you are not the only one who will be paying that particular cost_. 

He stood a little straighter, hands clasped behind his back. His chest ached from the bruises of the stun-bolts, and his face hurt where he had landed on it during the ersatz attack, but Hux was used to pain, and the little discomforts barely registered. 

As always, approaching planetfall, their descent seemed to speed up: instead of the graceful slow swelling of the world in their viewports, the layers of cloud appeared to be rushing up toward the _Dark Heart_ with almost alarming speed. Hux listened with half an ear as his people read out the parameters of reentry, and when pink flickers of plasma began to streak the hull as the ship forced her way down through the atmosphere he barely noticed the light show. He kept his balance with a kind of absentminded grace as they passed through the turbulence of the upper cloud layers, and when they finally broke through and the sheer vivid terrifying _greenness_ of the planet was revealed, his expression did not change at all. 

They were coming in over a small city, passing over the built-up area to a series of layered terraces of rice fields like green flounces at the bottom of a skirt. Past the terraces, the landscape changed, lines of trees running over gently rolling hills: some kind of fruit orchard. Hux could make out a structure of fairly impressive size and grandeur beyond the orchards, and he felt a flicker of that odd _extra_ awareness that had come to him since he and the gold crown had become close friends: _Phasma is there._

He knew it with certainty. When the _Dark Heart_ settled down on the pad he was unsurprised to see a figure in bright silver waiting a few steps in front of a crowd of strangers -- unsurprised, but more pleased than he had been with anything in a long time. It was so nice when things went _right_. 

It took him only a moment to recognize that the crowd of strangers contained two people he knew, and he thought briefly of the gorgeous decay of Eriadu, the poisoned sweetness of the flowers, the heavy atmosphere. Juliana Tarkin looked more ethereal and delicate than ever in layers of seafoam gauze, but Hux was fairly sure she was still made up largely of knife-edges and ambition, whereas her cousin Cyril beside her looked uncomfortable but determined. 

He felt Ren's presence a split second before Ren himself entered the bridge, coming to stand beside him. “We're here,” Hux said, unnecessarily. “We made it.”

He was not sure which of them he meant to reassure.

  


#

  


When the ramp descended, stepping out into the rain-washed air -- cool, _green_ , pleasantly damp rather than thick as syrup -- was a little like walking into the shallows of a lake. The moment afterward, when the crowd surged forward to surround him, was rather more like diving in headfirst. Hux was glad of it -- of the distraction of doing this part of his job, greeting the Tarkins and the Balardine family, being seen, being _on_. This he could do without a lot of effort, and while he did not quite enjoy it he at least knew he was doing it well. 

He barely had a chance to talk with Phasma after the introductions. The only information he could give her in public was more or less the information she already knew, that he’d told her over the comms; she was able to tell him a little of what the Tarkins had been up to during the talks, and her relief at having him there was palpable even through the impersonal shield of the helmet. Hux put as much reassurance into his words and his bearing as possible, aware that he did not currently have the strength to keep this up for very long at all.

  


#

  


Juliana Tarkin cut Hux out of the milling crowd of people with expert ease, separating him adroitly from Ren and Phasma and even Anson Balardine himself. She was too clever to take him by the arm; it would make her look simpering, instead of necessary to his project here of assembling some kind of government that could win a war. Juliana was entirely agenda in her seafoam silks: simpering was not in the idiom she had acquired since the last time Hux had seen her. 

"You ought to see your command center," she said briskly, leading him into the Balardine governor's mansion. It was a many-winged edifice, columned colonnades and balconies suitable for standing on and making speeches from. The steps up to the front door were pale greenish granite. They matched Juliana's dress.

Hux had a vague moment of wondering whether she’d done that deliberately before deciding that it mattered even less than half the other things currently taking up space in his mind. He was wearing his pleasantly neutral expression, the one he used when listening to people whose advice he did not necessarily plan on taking: it was a _wait and see_ kind of expression, and he had an idea he might be using it a lot in the near future. 

He walked rapidly, just slightly more rapidly than was comfortable for Juliana in the shoes she was wearing, and appeared not to be aware of this at all. 

If she noticed, she didn't let her noticing show up on her face. Those shoes clicked on beside him, one and a half steps to every one of his strides, and Juliana kept up a serene, informative stream of political chatter as they went: telling him in a low tone all about the allies which the Tarkin clan had suborned, influenced, or downright threatened into throwing their finances or hopes or even -- occasionally -- their manpower behind Hux's endeavor.

It was the sort of briefing one expected to get from a senior political officer. And yet, Hux had met Juliana _once_ before this expedition into the bowels of Balardine's house.

They fetched up in a second-floor chamber which had once been some sort of drawing room. The ghosts of its former life were still visible in its crown moldings and the curved glass of the bow window at one end, almost like the viewport on a starship bridge. The rest of the room was given over entirely to the equipment of a modern war machine: consoles, comms links, desks. In the center of the room was a grand table, made entirely of inlaid wood and mother-of-pearl, with enough chairs around it for a council of war -- and above it floated a hologram of the assembled fleet. 

Hux stopped listening to Juliana, stepping closer to the table with its holoproj manifest. The entirety of the Tarkin fleet was there, plus the motley crew of Eres Khataj’s mercenary ships. By comparison to the Nova fleet the Tarkin ships looked impressive -- the same arrowhead design as all the Star Destroyers since built -- but Hux knew with a kind of vicious clarity just how badly they were outclassed by anything the First Order had in stock. 

He tapped a control on the table and the projection zoomed in to show him one of the Tarkin ships, and now he could see as Phasma had seen before him how the stock powerplants had been replaced with KDY ion drives, bigger and more powerful than the original Hoersch-Kessel drive units: as he focused in further he could see the upgraded shield generators and the augmented weaponry that Letitia Tarkin had bought and paid for, and did a bit of rapid mental calculation. These were faster, stronger, more powerful, and more deadly than the _Victory-II_ class ships they had once been; but even so, a handful of these and Khataj’s mismatched fleet was no match for more than a couple battle groups of the First Order’s navy. 

He was outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered by orders of magnitude. He had superiority neither in firepower, numbers, or general equipment; he could not hope to prosecute this particular war on anything other than strategy and tactics. He was going to have to win this with his brain, and right now Hux’s brain felt more like a toxic soup of warring responsibilities than the clean cold machine he desperately wanted it to be. 

Belatedly he realized Juliana Tarkin was still talking. 

"-- and at some point in the very near future, General, it will be necessary to reveal to your allies just exactly what you're planning to put in place where the First Order used to be -- if you'd like to look at the projections on that desk over there, the second from the window, there are some preliminary sketches of new uniforms and insignia -- though of course we need a title for you, first --"

When she smiled she looked like a knife. A knife that talked.

Hux sighed, feeling the air catch in his chest: he was still taking the droid’s medicines whenever he remembered to, and he could feel the slightly increased gravity of Frey’s Hope dragging at him as he turned to regard Juliana. Tarkins always reminded him of edged weapons: in this case it was a delicate filigree-hilted dagger, but a blade nonetheless, and one he could not afford to ignore. 

“I think we’d agreed on _emperor_ ,” he said. “When this was first discussed. It’s at least a recognizable title.” _And a damn sight less embarrassing than Supreme Leader_ , he did not add.

Juliana laughed, and Hux thought it might be fairly close to her actual laugh, if she had one. "That it is," she said. "Emperor Hux, then. Your Imperial Majesty." She inclined her head, a little bow, and he felt the tiny hairs on the back of his neck try to stiffen beneath his collar; he could tell, of course he could tell, that she was presenting this entire room, all this preparation, all the work that had been done in advance of his arrival, as her own achievement, and he knew that he would have to _deal with_ Juliana Tarkin one way or another, before this was all over, and knew just as clearly that right now he had no idea _how_. 

“Thank you,” he said, clear and entirely expressionless, and nodded to her. “This is excellent work. I appreciate the amount of effort that has gone into preparations, and particularly the efficiency demonstrated in upgrading the Tarkin fleet.”

"Of course, Your Imperial Majesty," said Juliana, "we wouldn't want to be caught flat-footed, not after you've been depending on us. Shall we get started with the uniform designs? And from there onward to policy. As time allows."

He could not actually think of anything he would rather do _less_ than look at uniform designs; but hopefully this could be dealt with quickly, and they could move on. He hadn’t seen Ren since they had landed, and he wanted to know how this planet felt to him, whether being here would help or hurt. 

Hux nodded, once, and tapped the key on the table that killed the fleet projection: the ghostly cyan ships winked out of existence, and he felt a cold finger touch the base of his spine at the ease with which they had been erased: the ease with which their real-world counterparts could be erased, with a single targeted blast of one _Resurgent_ -class SSD’s weaponry. 

“Just as you say, Honorable Tarkin,” he told her, with no expression whatsoever, and gestured for her to lead on.

  


#

  


Day drew into evening slowly on Frey’s Hope, the warmth of a summer day lingering in the air. Hux -- freed for a moment from the business of planning how the hell he meant to win this war, after all -- had slipped out onto the terrace, and then without meaning to, down the worn stone stairs to the lawn behind the house, and to the tangled boughs of the orchard beyond. 

Rice was the planet’s crop; peaches were the Balardine estate’s. The orchards Hux had seen from the air stretched in neat rows into the distance over gently rolling hills. In the long slant-light of evening the air itself seemed slightly tinted pale gold, like some fantastically jewel-clear syrup, slow and sweet and heavy and wild; and the shadows powder-blue shading into grey as color sank out of the landscape bit by bit. In the heavy golden light the trees themselves had leaves of jade, gnarled branches hung about with rose-gold fruit like little ripening suns. 

Hux stood for a long moment looking at the trees, as the light changed; and then he walked a little further away from the house, and stopped dead, hands closing tightly at his sides. Kylo Ren was standing beneath the tallest of the peach trees, a fragment of night torn out of this slow pale-golden peace, all tattered drapery and tumbled dark hair -- but the westering sun struck deep brown sparks from the depths of that hair, and rendered the mask dangling from one hand an alien artifact, a kind of assumed weight of order perilously balanced between worlds. 

He paid no attention to Hux. Hux might as well not have been there, which was -- strange, really: Ren usually felt his presence before Hux even entered the room. Instead Ren was looking with a strange, wonderful intensity at the peaches massed between the tree’s jade leaves, and Hux had to wonder if he had ever seen them before, and what he thought of it -- 

As he watched, Ren reached up and cupped the flesh of one sun-peach in his empty palm; turned his face up to where the shimmering late light came in shafts through the leaves, the planes of his cheeks in pale relief, faintly pink at the arch of his cheekbones; and plucked the fruit from its branch. It came easily. He held it, and turned it in that light to make it glow, and Hux saw on his face a dawning and uncomplicated sort of wonder.

That these peaches grew. That they were here, and Ren could touch them.

Touch, and then _bite into_ , with fine white teeth, a flash of brightness even in the light. Juice ran down the inside of his wrist in a slick bright line. Hux saw him _smile_ – felt, in mindtouch, the unconsciously-broadcast edges of a dawningly slow delight – and watched as he twisted his wrist and licked the line of peach juice away.

He had never seen Ren wear this expression before: as if the universe itself was kind, to provide such unexpected joy. And further: as if Ren was safe enough, _free_ enough, to recognize it, when provided.

Earlier, in the war room of their makeshift headquarters, he had looked at the little holoproj images of their pitiful fleet and recognized just how badly he was outgunned, how much this would have to rely entirely on strategy and tactics and planning. Had thought how many lives hinged on his own decision-making, how much he needed to get things right; and before that, watching Frey’s Hope grow in the _Dark Heart_ ’s bridge viewports, how much it all came down to him. How much of it was his fault, if these men did not die well. 

(All of it. All of it, with some small exceptions.)

But watching Ren now, in the slow golden light, watching that strange and astonishing _joy_ on those features, lighting them from within, Hux was conscious of a new and terrible certainty closing round his heart. He would do whatever he had to do in order to win the war -- that had never been in question -- but more than that, he would break and reshape the fabric of the galaxy itself in such a way that Kylo Ren _could_ look like that; in such a way that he would have cause to, on a regular basis, that this kind of astonishing wonderful pleasure would never again be _strange_ to him. 

Hux wrapped his arms around himself, shivering a little. He would, in fact, win this war, and he would work out how to do that; and in order to do so he would need to know _everything_. All the intelligence would have to come through him -- and the details of the supply lines, the equipment, the support and the engineering and the little stupid everyday mechanics of _how things were done_ he must both understand and be able to influence; there were so many things he had to do, and cause to be done, and the enormity of it dizzied him for a miserable, nauseated moment before _you must_ slammed back into place, clearing his vision. 

_You must_ , he told himself, watching Ren standing beneath the tree, with the sun on his hair. _You must. You must, so you can. So you will._

There was no _try_ here. There was simply _must_. 

Hux turned away, feet tangling in the grass for a moment, and the gravity of his new world tugged at him; it was only with a sharp effort that he kept himself from stumbling. He retraced his steps up to the terrace, turning once to look over his shoulder at the last of the sunset, and then went back inside. As the doors closed behind him, the dimness that enveloped Hux -- dimness shot with blue and green and white telltales, the glow of screens and holoproj displays -- was familiar; was _known_. 

He ignored the dull ache in his chest, the dragging weight of fatigue, as he sat down in the chair behind the desk they had set up for him, and closed his eyes for a moment before settling in to work.

  


#

  


Battered and scorched by the _Dark Heart_ ’s laser cannon fire, the comm station still hung where Hux and Ren had left it. The damage was real. The most prominent antennae were decimated, twisted and melted hunks of metal and plastic rather than the precisely-calibrated system Hux had supervised into existence. Second Lieutenant Abilene watched on the command center’s monitor banks as troopers in EVA gear welded the breach where the false Rebels had penetrated the toroidal living quarters shut, thinking all the while of how much General Hux would hate to see this.

It was important that she kept thinking he was dead. She would need to be able to say so, definitively, if anyone ever asked. He was dead, and she was doing a patch job on his last service to the First Order.

Thinking that way made her feel doubled, and both doubles were _sad_ : one of them sad because her General was dead, and one of them sad because her General was off leading an insurrection and she had to hold the line on this godsforsaken comm station without him and his guidance.

When the light cruiser dropped out of hyperspace and cast a huge shadow onto half of the troopers involved in repair, Abilene entertained the brief and glorious idea that the _Dark Heart_ was, for some unknown reason, returned, and that she could stop being in charge of _anything at all._

It wasn’t the _Dark Heart_. It hailed her as the _Dissident_ -class light cruiser _Spearpoint_ , and informed her in no uncertain terms that it would be disembarking a squadron of First Order Intelligence officers onto this comm station for the purposes of investigating the recent – incursion.

Even as Abilene gave them clearance to come aboard, she was thinking _it wasn’t real, how do I convince them it was, they’re Intelligence, they’re_ interrogators –

Her voice was so even. So grateful, as she directed the squadron into the crippled heart of her station (and when did she start thinking of it as hers?) – grateful that someone was investigating what had happened. Grateful that someone else was in control. It wasn’t even a _lie_.

Not yet.


End file.
